When you’re ready to print your creations, the printing setup will help you make sure your designs come out correctly. This software includes content-aware scaling, masking tools and perspective-based editing, but if you want in-depth photo editing tools, you’ll need to use Serif’s photo editing software, Affinity Photo.

Additionally, there are only 17 basic pre-made templates, whereas some other programs offer hundreds of templates. Although that’s more than what Illustrator offers, it’s a much smaller selection than the other programs we tested offer. Pretty neat, right? That means you can do a little digital painting and limited photo touch-up from within this vector program without needing to switch to photo editing software. But Affinity Designer has something Illustrator lacks: Pixel Persona, a separate tab that allows you to work with pixel brushes and a few other pixel tools within this vector-based software. Similarly to Illustrator, this software was designed more around vector tools than pixel tools. Based on info from Affinity’s user forum, it appears that Serif hopes to add an image-trace feature to the software in the future.

You can still hand-trace an image using the pen tool and create your own vector, but that takes more time. The one illustration tool we wish this software had was image tracing, which automatically turns a raster image into an editable vector.

Wacom intuos affinity photo