Canva has just announced a raft of expansions to its Professional Suite, but as a photography expert, it’s the seemingly smallest release that caught my eye: integrations between its Affinity creative software and both Capture One and DaVinci Resolve. That means the latter two pieces of software now support Affinity’s proprietary .af file type. And if you ask me, that’s a much bigger deal than it initially seems.
This integration will make it easier than ever to work between Affinity and Capture One and/or Affinity and DaVinci Resolve. And let’s not forget, Affinity is the best Photoshop alternative on the market, and Capture One is the best Lightroom alternative on the market; buddy them up with seamless file transfer makes them an even more viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom than ever before.
And while Capture One is admittedly rather expensive, Affinity balances the scales by being (almost) completely free. I thought Affinity and Capture One combined to deliver the best Adobe alternative workflow for photographers on the market before, and this news has only bolstered that opinion. The DaVinci Resolve integration won't be quite as ground-shaking for most creatives, but it’s still big news, made all the more interesting by Blackmagic’s news this week that DaVinci Resolve 21 is debuting stills compatibility for the very first time.
Canva's headline announcement is that its professional motion-design software, Cavalry, which Canva acquired earlier in the year, is now free. That’s right, Cavalry is taking a leaf out of Affinity’s book in that its full range of features is now free to use.
On the subject of Affinity, Canva has revealed that over five million users have adopted the free-to-use design suite since its Canva relaunch in October 2025. It’s getting a boost, too, with AI-powered assistance courtesy of Anthropic’s Claude AI, said to automate time-consuming tasks.
Finally, Canva has launched Brand Systems within Affinity. This allows users to build branded elements such as logos and photos within Affinity and publish them directly into Canva’s Brand Kit. Brand Kit is designed to help creatives retain control of branded assets, where approved assets are housed in one place for other teams to access, allowing for greater control of asset use and branding consistency.
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