Photoshop & Freehand alternatives?

[steve-halloween]

I'm a former user of old Freehand to create vector illustrations. Importing them into very old Photoshop, I would use magic wand to select & use airbrush, etc. I can't afford PS any more. Would Affinity Designer, or other Affinity products, be a good alternative? Attached is an example of the type illustration I do.  Thanks.

[MEB]

Hello steve-halloween,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Yes, Affinity Designer is a good alternative to Freehand. It's possible to create that type of illustrations with it.

Take a look at some of the works being posted by other users in the Share you work section.

Here's some threads with similar characteristics: Affinity illustrations and experiments, Fox Illustration Affinity Designer #Concept, Whales dream of french fries, A drawing - from start to finish, Kawaii metal covers, "R" for alphabet series. There's a lot more styles and examples: check the works of Paolo Limoncelli, Kevin (@retrograde), George (@eejits), and the list goes on... there's no way i could mention all. Sorry those not listed.

[Asha]

Welcome steve-halloween--there are both vector and raster tools available in Affinity Designer, so AD may be all you need. There is a free 10-day trial, so it is worth a try. If you need more options for pixel painting, Affinity Photo is great for raster editing, and it also has a 10-day trial.

[R C-R]

Be aware that if you have very old Freehand files -- anything stored in the Aldus or Macromedia Freehand formats used before Freehand MX was released -- it is very unlikely you will be able to open them in Affinity Designer. (If you are not familiar with the sad history of Freehand & Adobe's efforts to kill it, the Adobe Freehand Wikipedia article is worth a read. This should explain one of the reasons why some of us want to rely on Adobe products as little as possible!)

 

Freehand MX will open the older Freehand formats & convert them to MX files, but Freehand MX on the Mac won't run on anything later than OS X 10.6 because it is a PPC app that requires the Rosetta emulation software that is not a part of later OS X versions (because Apple's license to use it expired).

 

Since newer Macs will not usually run OS X versions older than they are (because those versions lack the necessary support for the newer hardware) this will be a problem if you want to work with those files unless you have an older Mac & a copy of Freehand MX. There are some partial workarounds for this but they are convoluted (& the legality of using some of them is at best uncertain) so I cannot recommend any of them.

[steve-halloween]

I am using the trial AD & have not found a tutorial to show how to do an illustration: use layers; make selection; use tools like brushes, etc.

[MEB]

Hi steve-halloween,

Here's some:

- How to Create a Detailed Lighthouse Flat Icon in Affinity Designer

- How to Create a Game Character Sprite Sheet in Affinity Designer

- Create an Autumn Girl Illustration in Affinity Designer

- Create a Friendly, Futuristic Robot in Affinity Designer

- How to Create a Cartoon Penguin Winter Illustration in Affinity Designer

 

For tutorials about Affinity Designer's features/tools check this thread.

[R C-R]

Considering how new AD is, I am amazed by the number of tutorials (both video & step-by-step) that are already available on the web from various sources. The last time I did a Google search on "Affinity Designer tutorial" it returned over 270,000 hits! Of course, some of them aren't really about using AD, but even so it is a very impressive number, a strong indication of how enthusiastically the app is being adopted by the user community.

[BonnieJFW]

Thank you for the tutorials!