Recently Adobe has changed their Terms of Service to basically say they own your content in the cloud. Many people are not happy about that and the price.
I have been using Affinity for some time and the price is very good. Today I got an email advertising that Affinity products now have a 6 months free trial to see if you like the software. I would encourage you to give Affinity a try to help design your projects for your CNC machines. The products are quite robust and there are a ton of tutorials available. I will admit that the software is not easy to learn but then no high level graphics program is. Adobe has a huge learning curve and costs you a lot to use. With Affinity you buy it and use it forever.
So give Affinity a try for 6 months free with no obligation. I think you will like it and if you decide to buy it you can get it for half price all the time but if you pay full price it is only $70.00. So compared to Adobe that is a real bargin to boost your creativity. If you currently do not use any of the high end graphics programs this is a chance to get your feet wet at no cost and dive in at a lost cost of you like it.
I use Affinity Designer to design SVGs and have used Affinity Photo to edit photos for my photo club submissions.
Look at the top for the red banner to get 50% off or try free for 6 months.
And, concerning Adobe, you forgot to mention the subscription only model which is when I bailed. In most aspects I find Affinity Designer as good or better that Illustrator in addition to the price and helpful community. I’ve been using it since the onset when they were Mac only, all my design creation is done with Designer and output as SVG for CNC work. It’s constantly updated and improved as well. (They’ve recently added DWG and DXF export.) It also works seamlessly on iPad which I prefer for design due to the more tactile approach of using a pencil versus a mouse.
Affinity Photo has replaced Photoshop for me as well. A few of the tools behave differently but it gets the same job done. Unless you’re stuck in a workplace environment where the platform is dictated for compatibility why feed Adobe?
I’m guessing here, haven’t read those new terms of service, but it sounds like your creative endeavors on the cloud might become fodder for AI training, the next generation of Large Everything Models.
Maybe to a fault. It seems like every time I start any of the Affinity programs that I bought they want to be updated.
I bought the full suite last year but have to admit that I have hardly learned it thus far. I need to find some intro hand holding videos focused on the type of stuff of interest to the CNC community. There is a TON of power there, but its a struggle to figure out how to do what I want usually.
Affinity has some excellent tutorial resources produced by Serif themselves. Affinity Designer tutorials extend to 65 short video clips covering all of the features you may want to use. The official Affinity learning portal to Designer, Photo and Publisher is here:
Yup, they have a good search facility and if you can name what you want with something recognisable, you should be be able to find what you want. Alternatively, an AI search could help you to use graphic designer terminology and find what you want rapidly.