The best Photoshop alternative is now completely free, and I can't quite believe it.

Call me cynical, but when Canva said it had some news about Affinity, my heart dropped. For a decade, the three Affinity apps have been the best non-subscription alternatives to Adobe software that we've seen. There was Photoshop alternative Affinity Photo, Illustrator alt Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher for desktop publishing.

The creative software company Canva bought Affinity's owner Serif last year, and at the start of the month, Affinity's website went dark. That led to a lot of speculation. Was Affinity V3 coming, or was Canva planning to introduce a subscription plan like Adobe? Even worse, had it decided to pull the plug completely? The last thing we expected was that Affinity would be relaunched as a completely free app.

Instead of three apps, the main tools from Affinity Photo, Designer and Illustrator have been packed into a single program, now simply called Affinity. That means vector, photo, and layout tools all in the same place. The new Affinity is available to download for Mac and Windows now, and an iPad version is in the works. And all versions will be totally free.

I know what you're thinking: where's the catch? Well, it seems there isn't one. Users will need to create a free Canva account, but there's no need for a Canva Pro subscription. And there are no tools locked away as premium extras: all features are free to use from the start.

Some existing users might be concerned about the three apps being rolled into one, and I've not yet been able to work out if some tools have been lost along the way. I've mainly been looking at how it can handle the general image editing that I would do in Photoshop, and the main tools that I would expect are all there, including selection tools, clone stamps, masks and adjustment layers with all the usual blending modes.

The new Affinity has a new design, but it still feels very familiar. Most of the tools are easy to find, including Smart Selections, live filters, retouching and compositing tools, and there's batch processing help speed up repetitive edits.

PSD, AI, PDF, SVG, TIFF and IDML files are all supported, along with a unified proprietary .af file format, and I was able to open and edit Canon raw photos for editing with no problem.