. Use Affinity Designer’s native tools to further refine the weight, colour, shape, opacity and gradient of every stroke at any time. Rasterize strokes, layers or groups at any time to access pixel paint tools such as erase and smudge. Zipped File Size: 188 MB. File Types Included:.AFDESIGN. Software compatibility: Affinity Designer 1.6+. Affinity Designer is the fastest, most efficient and arguably the best vector graphic design software to come along in recent years. More affordable and more specialised than Adobe Creative Suite, it's ideal for working on websites, UI design, concept art, illustrations and icons, and all kinds of graphics. I am really considering the Keto diet myself. I had some health issues several years ago that left me inactive, and I sure gained weight. I am 76 and want to lose some weight, but it’s so hard. I bought the “Keto for Dummies” book on Amazon, and I also have DB for advice. I guess I’ll give the diet a go. Thanks for your encouragement.

Affinity Designer is a vector or raster app. It’s a competitor to Adobe’s Illustrator and allows you to design various elements for print or digital publication.

It’s part of the Affinity package of design tools made by Serif. Use it to do anything from making a business card to mock up an app. Affinity Designer is made for Mac iOS, Windows, and the iPad.

Here, we’ve collected some of the best for everyone from beginners to more seasoned pros, a mix of video and written tutorials. It’s a great place to start for upskilling with your first steps in Affinity Designer!

Affinity Designer UI Overview

If you are new to Affinity Designer or just want an overview of the tool and what it looks like before making a purchase, this UI overview is the place to start. The video lasts less than 5 minutes and walks through the user interface, highlighting a few key elements of the software.

Affinity Designer: The File Menu

Another beginner tutorial, this video takes you through the file menu and looks at each option and how to use it. Rory Townsend, who made the video, also has similar video tutorials with each of the other menu options to help you really get a good hold on all the things you can do with Affinity Designer and where each individual tool or option is located in the menu.

Affinity Designer: 10 Basics

This is the ultimate getting started video guide for Affinity Designer, with all the basics in one video. You’ll learn how to get started with a new document, use premade and custom shapes, work with colors, see how layers work, combine shapes, work with vectors and the vector brush and pen tools, add text to a file, and save and export. It’s all in an easy to follow video and you can get all this information in less than 20 minutes. Plus, the video host Jesse Showalter, has plenty of energy so this tutorial anything but boring.

Affinity Designer Basic Logo Design

Affinity Designer is a tool that allows you to work with vector or raster images. That means you can create logos that can be scaled for any use with the software. In this tutorial, you walk through all the steps to create a simple vector logo using tools in Affinity Designer.

How to Create a Flat Vector Illustration in Affinity Designer

Because of vector functionality, Affinity Designer can also be used to create illustrations. This tutorial takes you through the steps to create a flat illustration, such as the example above, that you can apply to full-scale illustrations, logo, or icon design. The tutorial includes step-by-step instructions and plenty of screenshots that you can use to follow along on your own.

Using the Layers Panel

Using layers and groups is a powerful function that can help keep files organized and a lot easier to manage. Using them in Affinity Designer is fairly easy. Learn everything you need to know about layers and groups in this short video from the makers of the software.

How to Create an Icon in Affinity Designer

Icon design is something almost everyone comes across at some point. Affinity Designer is the perfect tool for creating all manner of icons. This tutorial takes you through the process step-by-step, and even includes some bonus information such as how to choose the right size when designing an icon and how to use various tools. Every step includes screenshots to make understanding easy.

Symbols in Affinity Designer

Using symbols as linked objects allow you to edit one element and it impacts everything in the design. (This is an awesome feature.) This tutorial shows you how to use symbols as intelligent linked objects for great global editing capability. (Learn this pro trick in less than 5 minutes!)

Using Text Effects

Text manipulations can be somewhat controversial. Purists say you should never mess with a typeface, but sometimes you have to use certain effects to make it work for your project. This Affinity Design tutorial shows you how to do just that. You’ll get an introduction to text effect manipulations in this easy to follow video.

How to Create Patterns in Affinity Designer

Patterns have a lot of practical use from website backgrounds to the main artwork for a poster or brochure. From subtle repeating shapes to something a little bolder, there are a few different ways to create a pattern in Affinity Designer. This tutorial explores three options. Note there are a lot of steps here, but the instructions and screenshots are easy to follow. Don’t let the depth of the lesson intimidate you.

Affinity Designer for iPad

The recording of a live session provides an overview of everything you need to use Affinity Designer effectively on an iPad. You’ll get an overview of tools and the software as well as creating specific things (a playing card, book cover, and poster) using tablet-based tools. The tutorial lasts over an hour and is comprehensive.

Pen Tool Masking in Affinity Designer

Use the Pen tool in Affinity Designer to create a dynamic mask of a selection of an image and apply modifications. This is a cool feature that can take some time to learn and this tutorial gives you a jumpstart.

Shapes Around a Curved Line in Affinity Designer

In less than 5 minutes, you can apply shapes to a curved line. You’ll learn how to create a brush from a shape and use that to apply to any shape or size of curved line. The tutorial explains this function clearly and shows how to apply this highly functional feature.

Advanced Color Features in Affinity Designer

You can create, save, and store colors and fills in Affinity Designer. This is great for palettes that will be reused so you don’t have to manually renter color mixes every time. Using these advanced color features is easy to learn if you know the tricks offered in this video tutorial.

Everything You Need to Know About Affinity Designer Brushes

Brushes can help speed workflows and allow you to create custom stroke styles. This tutorial shows you how to use the tool including basics of the brushes panel, how to set up vector or raster brushes, how to create your own brushes, how to install brush packs, and how to use brushes from Photoshop or Illustrator.

Affinity Designer Point Transform Tool

Use the point transform tool to change the look of a geometric shape in Affinity Designer. This tool lets you change shapes and alters the look of objects.

Advanced Axonometric Grid Setup

An axonometric grid shows a three-dimensional object at a skewed angle so you can see multiple sides in the illustration. Affinity Designer allows you to set up an axonometric grid for projects. This tutorial takes you through creating the custom setup.

Affinity Designer Templates

We're covering the basics of Affinity Designer, helpful tutorials, comparisons with other apps, and the best templates and assets to use.

IrfanView (/ˈɪərfænvjuː/) is an image viewer, editor, organiser and converter program for Microsoft Windows.^[5][6][7] It can also play video and audio files, and has some image creation and painting capabilities. IrfanView is free for non-commercial use; commercial use requires paid registration.^[5] It is noted for its small size,^[6] speed,^[6] ease of use, and ability to handle a wide variety of graphic file formats. It was first released in 1996.^[7]

IrfanView is named after its creator, Irfan Škiljan, from Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, living in Vienna.^[8] The current version of IrfanView, 4.56, works under all versions of Windows from Windows 2000 SP4 to Windows 10, while all older versions are compatible with Windows 95/98/ME^[7][9] and can also be run in Linux under Wine^[7][10] and in macOS using WineBottler.^[7][11]

Features[edit]

What Does Affinity Designer Do

The basic 32-bit installation of IrfanView occupies 2.36 MB of disk space, and a full install with all optional plugins requires about 16.1 MB – with the 64-bit versions taking up more space.

IrfanView is specifically optimized for fast image display and loading times. It supports viewing and saving of numerous file types including image formats such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, JP2 & JPM (JPEG2000), PNG (includes the optimizer PNGOUT; APNG can be read), TIFF, raw photo formats from digital cameras, ECW (Enhanced Compressed Wavelet), EMF (Enhanced Windows Metafile), FSH (EA Sports format), ICO (Windows icon), PCX (Zsoft Paintbrush), PBM (Portable BitMap), PDF (Portable Document Format), PGM (Portable GrayMap), PPM (Portable PixelMap), TGA (Truevision Targa), WebP, FLIF (Free Lossless Image Format) and viewing of media files such as Flash, OggVorbis, MPEG, MP3, MIDI, and text files.^[12][13]

While viewing images, there are several fit-to-screen scaling options and an automatic slideshow function. The viewer can open in sequence all the image-files and video clips (of most formats, including AVCHD) contained in a folder. Slideshows can contain both still images and video clips.

Affinity Designer For Dummies Online

IrfanView can create screensavers and slide shows from collections of images with optional accompanying MP3 audio. These can be saved as stand-alone executables which run on Windows computers without IrfanView installed. For slideshow creation, screensaver creation and batch image translations, preset image processing steps can be applied to selected sets of images.

IrfanView can create icons by converting common graphic files into .ico format. It supports Adobe-compatible 8BF image processing filters, including many freely downloadable ones, primarily for application to whole images.

The program has TWAIN and WIA driver support for retrieving images from scanners, and can be used to cut and paste images into OneNote 2016 and other Office 2016 programs which no longer provide direct scanning support. It also has extended support for taking screenshots.

Image editing includes crop, resize, and rotate. Images can be adjusted by modifying their brightness, contrast, tint, and gamma level^[14] manually or automatically, and by converting them between file formats. Many of these changes can be applied to multiple images in one operation using batch processing.^[15] Batch processing can also be used for renaming, and for the production of HTML web pages. Resize can be applied towards the display of animated GIF images to make them larger in either windowed or full-screen modes.

A plugin allows IrfanView to support lossless JPG operations: horizontal or vertical flip, rotation by 90° increments, and cropping.^[16][17]

IrfanView can direct the active image to open in an external graphics editor (Adobe Photoshop, for example) if it is installed. Four more keyboard shortcuts allow the files to be renamed, moved, copied or deleted individually, while multiple files can be processed quite easily too via the thumbnails window (before the batch conversion dialog if need be).

The program has been internationalized in over twenty languages; English is the default. The IrfanView toolbar can be skinned from many sets of icons.

Plugins[edit]

IrfanView uses plugins to handle several additional image, video, and sound formats and to add optional functionality such as filter processing or other program features.^[3][7] With its diverse format plugins, the program has been recommended for viewing obscure image formats, or corrupted files, which commercial photo editing software cannot read.^[18][19]

Thumbnails[edit]

This function displays thumbnail file previews, allowing picture organization and management, at sizes from 50 × 50 to 600 × 600 pixels. The user can select a number of thumbnails to perform Copy/Move/Delete operations on them, or send them to IrfanView's Batch Processing module or an external program such as Adobe Photoshop.

Batch Processing[edit]

Irfanview has a powerful batch conversion/rename feature that can automatically perform an image manipulation on a set of files. The batch conversion feature supports converting to different image formats, cropping, resizing, changing color depth, mirroring, rotating, and changing color balance. Files that are converted using the batch conversion feature can be saved using any given naming scheme.

Search engine toolbar[edit]

Prior to version 4.41 installer versions of IrfanView supported a number of browser toolbars. Version 4.40 optionally installed the Amazon 1Button App (formerly the Amazon Browser bar).^[1] Versions prior to 3.97 included the eBaybrowser toolbar, with installation selected by default. As of 4.41 no toolbars are included in the installer.

Reception[edit]

Irfanview has been positively reviewed as 'really good' for easily and rapidly viewing and manipulating images, with its editing and drawing tools.^[20] Other writers have focused on its ability to open a wide variety of image formats.^[18][19] In a series of image quality tests conducted in 2004, compared with commercial image compressors and Adobe Photoshop 7, Irfanview 3.91 produced 'consistently better images than the Adobe Photoshop JPEG encoder at the same data rate', and its JPEG2000 compression quality 'closely followed' the best codec, JasPer.'^[21] According to IrfanView's official website, since 2003, IrfanView has been downloaded over 1 million times per month. One independent review in 2017 described Irfanview as 'the Swiss Army Knife of image viewers'.^[15]

Author[edit]

Irfan Škiljan graduated from the Vienna University of Technology. In a 2006 interview, then 32-year-old Škiljan said that he was able to more or less live off the software, generating income with the sale of licenses for commercial users and of special versions for different customers.^[22]

Logo/mascot[edit]

According to Škiljan, the IrfanView logo and mascot is a 'road cat' (there is a tire track across the smallest icon)^[23] but that he 'likes cats', and the icon is 'a joke' – the IrfanView website pictures him holding a white domestic cat.^[8]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abHistory of changes for older versions of IrfanView
2. ^Skiljan, Irfan. 'History of changes'. IrfanView. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
3. ^ ^abIrfanView 64-bit version Irfanview.com. Retrieved 4 January 2021.
4. ^Additional languages for IrfanView
5. ^ ^abGralla, Preston. 'IrfanView'. PC World. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
6. ^ ^abcPash, Adam (6 October 2006). 'Download of the Day: IrfanView (Windows)'. Lifehacker. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
7. ^ ^abcdefBoudreaux, Ryan (23 August 2011). 'IrfanView: A robust (and free) image editor for your toolkit'. TechRepublic. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
8. ^ ^abSkiljan, Irfan. 'About the author'. Irfanview.com. Retrieved 27 September 2015.
9. ^'Windows 10 Compatibility for IrfanView by Irfan Skiljan: Compatible'. Windows Compatibility Center. Microsoft. Retrieved 4 August 2015.
10. ^'IrfanView 3.x, 4.x (test results)'. WineHQ.org. Retrieved 14 May 2011.
11. ^'Irfanview for Mac: Apple Support Communities'. Retrieved 26 May 2011.
12. ^'List of supported formats'. Irfanview.com. Retrieved 12 July 2010.
13. ^Harris, Andy (2010). HTML, XHTML, and CSS All-in-One For Dummies (2nd ed.). For Dummies. p. 107. ISBN978-0-470-53755-8. Retrieved 9 September 2011.
14. ^Crowder, David A. (2007). Google Earth for Dummies. For Dummies. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing. pp. 289–290. ISBN978-0-470-09528-7. Retrieved 23 June 2010.
15. ^ ^abEllis, Cat; Marshall, Carrie (5 May 2017). 'IrfanView review'. TechRadar. Retrieved 4 May 2020.
16. ^'IrfanView Plugins'. Irfanview.com. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
17. ^'Lossless jpegtran applications'. JPEGclub.org. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
18. ^ ^abBrundage, Barbara (2009). Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual. O'Reilly Media / Pogue Press. p. 73. ISBN9781449379520. Retrieved 23 June 2010.
19. ^ ^abNelson, Sharon D., Esq; Simek, John W.; Maschke, Michael (2009). The 2009 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guide. American Bar Association. p. 104. ISBN978-1-60442-321-1.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
20. ^Harris, Andy; McCulloh, Chris (2008). HTML, XHTML, and CSS All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies. Wiley Publishing. p. 97. ISBN978-0-470-18627-5. Retrieved 23 June 2010. Features extensive introduction and opinion.
21. ^Ebrahimi, Farzad; Chamik, Matthieu; Winkler, Stefan (November 2004). 'JPEG vs. JPEG2000: An Objective Comparison of Image Encoding Quality'. In Tescher, Andrew G. (ed.). Applications of Digital Image Processing XXVII. Proceedings of the SPIE. Applications of Digital Image Processing XXVII. 5558. pp. 300–308. CiteSeerX10.1.1.65.5495. doi:10.1117/12.564835. S2CID6393903.
22. ^Hosbach, Wolf (2006). 'Hat es sich gelohnt?' (in German) (6). PC Magazin. Retrieved 28 October 2008.Cite journal requires |journal= (help)(English tr.)
23. ^'IrfanView Frequently Asked Questions'. Irfanview.com. Retrieved 27 September 2015.

External links[edit]

Affinity Designer For Dummies 2020