Affinity arrives free on iPad, with AI tools on Canva premium plans

Canva released its unified Affinity app for iPad on November 2, combining photo editing, vector design, page layout and sketching in a free application for individuals. Desktop .af projects can continue on the tablet. The launch announcement describes an interface designed for touch and Apple Pencil, keeping artwork and photographs in one project.

Canva AI Studio works inside the app with a Canva premium plan, covering tasks such as background removal and blur correction. Core editing, workspace customization and export are free to individuals signing in with a free Canva account.

The iPad’s Sketch workspace lets users develop a hand-drawn idea into precise vector curves in the same document. Accompanying touch-control material explains support for Pencil pressure, tilt and double-tap, with customizable behavior and shortcuts. Touch interactions also cover selecting, duplicating and grouping objects, alongside navigating a detailed canvas.

A separate launch-day drawing lesson uses Nora Toth’s character artwork to connect sketching with a finished illustration. It organizes elements on different layers, creates editable linework with Pencil and Node tools, and combines vector shapes with pixel-brush texture. The example keeps drawing, precise outlines and coloring together in one document, allowing further changes as the illustration develops.

Imports have conversion limits. The FAQ says advanced InDesign formatting and tables can need manual adjustment, while Photoshop smart objects and advanced filters may flatten into an image.

An iPad photo-editing lesson published on launch day illustrates the core editing workflow using a photographer’s portrait. It covers Pencil retouching, non-destructive contrast and color adjustments, selective sharpening, and saving an editable Affinity file before exporting a JPEG. These are company-provided teaching examples, showing the editing stages available alongside the optional AI tools.

Generated edges remain editable

Generative Expand, one of the premium AI tools, creates content beyond an existing picture’s boundaries to change its proportions or composition. Canva describes extending the working area and generating a continuation that fits its surroundings. The resulting areas remain available for masking, tone adjustments, compositing or removal. That makes the tool relevant to layouts needing extra space around an image, with subsequent manual refinement still part of the workflow.

Super Resolution increases image dimensions while enhancing detail, according to Canva’s feature description. The company positions it for cropped pictures, older assets and other low-resolution material destined for print or larger output. Retouching, color correction and compositing can continue after enlargement. Its documentation explicitly says the feature does not replace properly captured high-resolution originals.

Canva also distinguishes local editing from content sent to its services. It says locally stored Affinity content is inaccessible to the company and is excluded from AI training, model evaluation and quality assurance. For material users choose to upload or export to Canva, privacy preferences in Canva settings control whether it may help improve AI features.

The iPad launch omits some desktop capabilities, including book management, data merge and macro recording. Canva promises further features and free updates, without individual delivery dates for those items.

The Korean App Store lists the app as free with in-app purchases. Prices observed on November 4 were KRW9,900 monthly or KRW99,000 annually for Canva Pro, and KRW13,900 monthly or KRW139,000 annually for Business. Those are Korean storefront prices. The listing requires iPadOS 18.0 or later and shows a download size of about 1.9GB. Its ten listed interface languages include English and Japanese; Korean is absent.