Serif have just released version 1.7 of both of their flagship applications, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. These tools provide excellent alternatives to Adobe products such as Photoshop and Illustrator with a much lower, pay once price tag. The 1.7 update applies to all platforms, Windows, Mac and iOS.
Affinity Photo changes:
- Big performance increases across Mac, Windows and iPad
- Pen and dial support for Surface devices
- HDR / EDR monitor support
- At least 2x faster loading of RAW files
- More effective noise reduction, hot pixel removal and wide colour space development
- New Sub Brushes to combine multiple brushes in a single stroke
- Symmetry (up to 32-way) is now supported – including on-canvas controls and optional mirroring
- On the fly nozzle rotation now available with shortcut keys
- New “Procedural texture” and “Voronoi” filter effects
- Live filter effects have been rewritten to improve performance
- An all-new HSL adjustment layer has been added, supporting custom hue ranges, new UI and picker controls
- Layers studio revamp
- Alternate futures for document history
- HEIF images can now be loaded, including loading of any depth map
- Added support for 12bit and 16bit CMYK TIFF files
- New Assets Panel available to store and drag and drop regularly used assets
Affinity Designer changes:
- Big performance increases across Mac, Windows and iPad
- Pen and dial support for Surface devices
- HDR / EDR monitor support
- Create and edit directly in any isometric plane
- Arrowheads!
- New transform mode in Node tool
- Lasso selection of nodes
- New sculpt mode added to pencil
- Add unlimited strokes and fills to a single shape
- New point tranform tool
- Many grid improvements, including a new cube grid and column guides
- Many PSD import / export improvements
- Layers studio revamp
- Pixel persona now supports sub-brushes and symmetry (up to 32-way)
- Alternate futures for document history
Learn more in the video below.