ILLUSTRATION AND ART
Like a lot of creative fields, vector illustration is dominated by Adobe. Its Illustrator package is available as part of the Creative Cloud subscription, which will set you back $31.49 a month if you pay monthly. It’s less if you pay a year in advance, but there are cheaper alternatives.
Or at least, there are alternatives. One of the biggest competitors to Adobe has always been Corel, which maintains its own suite of creative apps, and also has a subscription model—although you can buy the software outright, too. CorelDraw trails Illustrator by two years— having been released in 1989, compared to 1987 for Adobe’s app— but both programs benefited hugely from the integration of TrueType fonts in Windows 3.1. Corel was an early Windows champion, while Adobe was very Mac-focused, and nascent Windows versions of its apps lagged behind. That’s all changed now, and you can circumvent the need to subscribe by purchasing CorelDraw ( www.coreldraw.com) for a one-off payment of just $600 (you get the entire app suite).
That’s not very budget-friendly, so we have to look elsewhere. Xara Designer Pro ( www.xara.com) is $299, so rather prices itself out, too. Serif’s Affinity Designer, at $50, is a professional-focused app, so doesn’t come with much in the way of quick fixes or Instagram-style filters, but does give you complete control over what you’re doing, and comes with a set of pro-grade tools. There’s a wealth of video tutorials online ( www.affinity.serif.com) for those who want to master the software.
Designer offers high performance, too, as it uses hardware acceleration for 60fps panning, and a zoom that goes up to 1,000,000 percent. Most of the work is still done on the CPU, but OpenGL support means it can offload some of the workload to the GPU. For professionals, the Affinity apps support Pantone color swatches, and a full CMYK workflow, with ICC color management.
The Affinity series expanded in 2015 with the release of Affinity
Photo, a much more wallet-friendly rival to Adobe Photoshop. Affinity
Publisher, which takes on Adobe InDesign, is currently available as a free beta. However, betas being betas, there will be bugs right now, and Serif says up-front that it’s not suitable for critical production work.
Manga or comic book creators might like to look at Clip Studio Paint ( www.
clipstudio.net), which offers tools for drawing comics and cartoons, as well as some animation features. The basic package is $50, while an enhanced EX version adds page management and pro animation for $220.
The Illustrator rivals keep on coming, too. Canvas X 2019 ( www.canvasgfx.com) is a tool for detailed technical illustrations, which boasts a detail level of 0.035 microns (a human red blood cell is five microns across). It costs $300 and is somewhat niche, so why not try Bloom, which only costs $50? The price doesn’t include updates, which are $25 a year if you want them, but the app is impressive, offering complete non-destructive editing and painting, because every filter, effect, brush stroke, or vector you create is stored as a separate object, meaning you can select it later, and tweak it. Another app called Bloom, a generative music creator by Brian Eno, tends to hog the search results, so make sure you head straight to http://thebloomapp.com.