Have you tired Canva?
It's free to sign up and design stuff
Paying just gives you more options but it's amazing what can be done with the freebie

 

Downloaded and will give it a good once over later. Thanks.

 

Never heard of it, but on the surface it looks interesting. My concern is that like so many other online tools, once you design something they want cash to save/download the finished product in high quality professional use formats? Havent gotten that far into the details yet...

 

wow, talk about trigger happy moderation. that was a long detailed post that got scrubbed. Sheesh.

Anyway. Whatever.

To resummerize...

Inkscape is not intuitive or up to task without menu diving and export workarounds. Deleted.

Canva, tried it, at first was interesting but didnt like all the "premium" non functioning options, still dont know if can save and download HQ finished product without paying a fee and it kept asking me to subscribe over and over. Meh

Gimp and Paint.net are on deck if Affinity stuff sucks too.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Oct 12, 2022

No thanks to anyone here, after hours and hours of searching around and downloading bogus garbage, I finally found buried under a bunch of other crap and figured out on my own how to implement the Affinity "solution". Everything is working, so now we'll finally see just how good these really are.

 

Well folks, for anybody who gives a shite, I think we have a winner here... Affinity Designer is the bees knees! It absolutely crushes the competition. Thus far I love everything about it, did 5 mockup logos which all exported easily and perfectly in vector, PNG and Jpeg formats. Done in a matter of about an hour.

I love all but one thing, the damn eraser situation. Why the hell couldn't they just add an icon to the toolbar?! I've searched, read tutorials and watched a bunch of videos but have yet to find a way to erase parts of simple letters/text (such as the tail on a "y" just to give an example). something about layers, masks and brushes is as far as Ive gotten with it. Otherwise its awesome and I highly recommend it to everybody who doesn't want to muck around with Adobe's absurd CC computer takeover crap.

I hope 'Photo is a similar experience. Gonna try an album cover photo/design next.

So thank you goes out to those who recommended it to me here

 

Last edited by a moderator: Oct 12, 2022

Thanks for the info. I'm in a similar situation and after reading your posts, would like to try out the Affinity suite. Any advice on where to begin looking for the Affinity 'solution'?

 

Well, Anybody who wants a FREE Photoshop 'Killer' then ChaSys Draw IES is the bomb... It is updated often, bloat-free, designed to work with both modern & ancient formats, uses all ur brush types from photoshop, paint shop pro, GIMP & others... Too many features to list & works on most windows down to windows 2000 I think, I use XP works great...

https://www.jpchacha.com/chasysdraw/

 

Not sure if this helps, but Photoshop, at least the 20.0.8 version I use (from 2018 I think) can be extremely streamlined so no shit is ever running other than Photoshop.exe, and the program itself starts up in under 2 secs. Adobe has added a shit ton of useless bloat, but the good news Photoshop happily ignores all of it if you simply delete it. Stuff like /Adobe Desktop Common, /Adobe PCD, /OOBE etc in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Adobe

 

Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are great alternatives — fast, high-quality, and no subscription. Designer handles vector logos and custom fonts really well, and Photo is excellent for album art and photo editing. Both are lightweight compared to Adobe. If you're on a budget, Inkscape (vector) and Photopea (Photoshop-style in browser) are solid free options. If you prefer the old Adobe feel, CS6 still works on Windows 10 (less so on 11), but you’ll need to find a legit copy, which can be tricky. Avoid shady sources. Overall, Affinity is the closest thing to "classic Adobe" without the bloat.

 

the ez way its pay canva pro for 1 week for around 3usd.

 

don't know where I stole this image from , maybe here...