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Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome, overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merten. Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems, today is Tuesday, where I give you the skinny on an app or a tool that could be useful for your personal productivity, you all might be familiar with design apps like Canva or PicMonkey. And if you are not familiar with Canva, I did discuss it back in Episode 40, The Tech Stack, Part two episode where I talk about some design tools that you might be interested in that you can include in part of your tech stack.

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One of those tools that I discussed was also a Affinity photo, and that's what we're going to chat about today.

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Now, if you are familiar with tools like Canva and PicMonkey, those are super quick design tools that are great for beginners and even for designers.

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A lot of designers are using those nowadays for quick projects and social media, but they still turn to those powerful editing apps when they need to do more in-depth design work like Photoshop.

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And everyone's familiar with Photoshop. It's the king of photo editing apps. But No one, there's a huge learning curve with apps like Photoshop, right?

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And no to Photoshop is pricey, especially if you're a beginner or someone that doesn't really use it all the time. You might not be able to justify the price tag for using something once a month or a few times a year, because sometimes Canva doesn't get exactly what you need to do and you need something a little bit more robust. And in those situations, we usually turn to Photoshop. But today I'm going to tell you about Affinity Photo now from their website.

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It says, Picture the future.

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If you could create your own photo editing software, it would work like this, whether it's quick corrections, delicate retouching or immersing yourself in the complex fine art with hundreds of layers. Affinity photo has you covered. So if you're a designer, you are familiar with things like layers and smart objects, digital painting, smoothing, background removal, maybe editing, raw photos. All of those things can be done with affinity photo. And they also edit C files, which is a standard Photoshop design file.

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So why am I bringing you affinity photo, which is super similar to Photoshop? Well, mostly because of price. Now, if we look at the pricing structure of Photoshop, you can have Photoshop through Adobe Creative Cloud. They do offer a free trial and it typically ranges from twenty dollars to sixty dollars a month. And that depends on how many of their creative apps you want to be subscribe to. And also it depends on whether you are a business, an individual or a student, because they do offer discounts for students that can get pretty pricey even if you're at the student level, which I think is about fifteen to twenty dollars a month.

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And you could get a one year licensing app from someplace like Best Buy for about two hundred and forty dollars a year. But again, you'll have to pay that each year. In comparison to affinity photo. They also offer a free trial and a one time payment of forty nine. Ninety nine and that's it. Forty nine dollars and ninety nine cents. And if you're listening to this during Thanksgiving week, they are offering 30 percent off for Black Friday.

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So that would bring the price down to thirty four dollars and 99 cents.

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If you have been looking for a robust photo editing tool that you can edit PSD images with, then go out and get it.

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Now, they also offer an iPad version, which is normally 1999 and their Black Friday special for that is thirteen ninety nine.

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So if you are a designer or someone who's been looking for an option of how to edit these fancy photos with layers and advanced options, go ahead and take a look at Affinity Photo. I will drop the link for you down in the show notes because this is a great alternative option. I have been using affinity for a couple of years now in place of Photoshop when I need more design structure, so I highly recommend it.

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It works just the same and it's definitely a lot more affordable. That is my tip for today.

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I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode. Down in the show. Notes are on the website at mirandamerten.com. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with another bestie who would love it too. And join me here next time.