What's the next best thing to replace Fireworks?

[debbier89115203]

LOVE my Fireworks and just purchased a brand new Mac only to find out that it's not supported on Catalina.  

SOOOOOO.....I guess I shall be learning a new program but I have no idea which one is most like Fireworks or would be most useful to me.  I mostly used Fireworks to design and edit images, logos, and print graphics.  

Any suggestions?

[Paul-M]

Photoshop, if you're prepared to invest the time has a ton of features but can feel clunky and unintuitive, the learning curve is steeper than Fireworks. The nearest I've seen to Fireworks is prrobably Affinity Designer, altough it lacks one or two features.

[debbier89115203]

Thank you! I was afraid someone was going to say Photoshop LOL.   I will check out Affinity Designer first......and go from there.  I'm sure I can learn Photoshop but man......Fireworks seems much easier to maneuver in!  

[rayek.elfin]

If you do, be sure to purchase all three: Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher. They're on Covid-19 sale currently as well, and very inexpensive for what you get in return. It really is a no-brainer.

The reason to get all three: they work seamlessly together (use the same file), and Publisher combines all three into one with its innovative "switch room to Photo or Designer" feature, and while Designer supports artboards, only Publisher supports pages and page templates. Coming from Fireworks I think you will appreciate that functionality.

Photo also offers a wide range of bitmap editing tools, while Designer focuses on illustration and GUI work.

The only real issue for someone coming from Fireworks is the lack of an export preview, which means you cannot preview export settings when exporting your assets and work. I find that extremely frustrating. But it is in the works according to the devs.

[Paul-M]

As rayek_elfin says if you buy all three affinity programs publisher, photo and designer. Publisher includes something called studio link that gives you access to virtually all the bitmap and vector tools of Designer and Photo under one ceiling (effectively in a single app), this is a really neat feature.

The main issue with Affinity Designer as well as the lack of an export preview is it lacks non-destructive free transform and perspective tools (equivelant to skew and distort tools in Fireworks), they're a big loss, there are some workarounds for certain tasks but it's not great. Afifnity Photo has a warp mesh tool but I'm pretty sure it it has to rasterise the selection, so thata's far from perfect too.

Affinity still has a lot of catching up to do with the warp tools in Photoshop & Illustrator too, I find arch, arc and fisheye can be useful tools, no equivelant in Affinity products to date. Might be a tad unfair making a direct comparison given the licensing/pricing differences between Adobe and Affinity.

[rayek.elfin]

Very much agree! The Affinity apps lack a number of features which are more-or-less basic and expected to be available to the average designer. The missing free transform is really frustrating at times.

Aside from these odd gaps in functionality, I find that the overall workflow has quite a few papercuts.

While I have all three apps in my toolkit, I do most of my work in PhotoLine, which I feel has a great workflow. For very specific GUI/prototyping work I tend to switch to Lunacy (which is a free Windows equivalent to Sketch).

Anyway, no app is perfect. Depends on your requirements, workflow, and the task/job at hand.

[samibahri]

install a virtual machine (i use parallels but you can use Virtualbox, it's free) with windows and continue to use fireworks.