1. HUGE performance improvements
The devs have supercharged performance so working with massive complex documents is even smoother in 1.7 on both Windows, Mac and iPad. And for Mac and iPad users, Metal Compute acceleration means filters, adjustments, tools and other operations render faster than ever before. In the video below, James shows us what performance gains you can expect to see using Metal Compute (GPU) over Software (CPU).
2. Focus on photography
Developed RAW engine
RAW handling in Affinity Photo has been vastly improved in 1.7. Features include faster loading, new demosaicing, more effective noise reduction, hot pixel removal and wide colour space development.
We will be delving more into the RAW improvements in Affinity Photo 1.7 on Spotlight soon…
Lens correction enhancements
With Affinity Photo 1.7, you can now have more control over lens corrections with the ability to add manual lens profiles. Plus, you can correct lenses that do not communicate electronically with the camera (so no EXIF data) with the new Lens Correction filter (in Photo Persona). Check out James’ video for a more detailed overview:
3. Upgraded brush engine
Multi-brushes
The new multi-brush technology brought to Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer 1.7 allows you to combine brushes, giving you a more interesting and less uniform brush stroke. Brushes with multiple nozzle textures have a choice of nozzle controllers/ramps for a more varied nozzle presentation. If you’ve updated to 1.7, you can also download the FREE multi-brush pack made exclusively for 1.7 users—Inksy Brushes (available through the in-app Welcome screen of Affinity Photo 1.7 on desktop)—created by our Creative Director Neil Ladkin, and put this new feature through its paces!
There’s a lot going on here - this new brush engine is insane #digitalpainting #madeinaffinity @affinitybyserif pic.twitter.com/UvJO4umYJE
— Neil Ladkin (@NeilLadkin) May 4, 2019
Symmetry mode
Affinity Photo sees the introduction of brush symmetry (up to 32-way) and optional brush mirroring (up to 5-way reflections).
On the fly nozzle rotation
We think this is really cool—in Affinity Photo 1.7 you can now rotate your brush nozzle while painting by using the arrow keys. Nice.
4. State-of-the-art filters
New filters
Live Radial Blur makes its first appearance in Affinity Photo 1.7, as does our brand spanking new Voronoi filter. See James’ short tutorial below on using the shiny new Live Radial Blur filter.
Procedural texture filter
This one blows our mind a bit, but for some this will be a game-changing feature. In Affinity Photo 1.7 you can now write your own filter effects with user-controllable parameters. In James’ demo below, he shows how this is useful when editing 3D renders.
5. Revamped Adjustments
HSL, Selective Colour, Vibrance and White Balance adjustments have all been overhauled, giving you even more flexibility to tweak colour in your images. In the example shown below, the HSL Adjustment has been used to change the hue and saturation of all the yellow parts of the image. Of course, masking the HSL Adjustment helps to keep parts of the image that should always stay yellow in this image, like the bowl of lemons and the lights.
6. Batch and macro improvements
Batch processing now supports scaling expressions (w, h and dpi) in the desktop versions of Affinity Photo. See James’ full tutorial on using Macros in the desktop version of Affinity Photo 1.7 below.
7. Crop tool
The 1.7 update sees some great improvements to the Crop Tool. You’ve now got more comprehensive preset management and you can now resize and resample simultaneously.
8. Assets Panel
The Asset Panel has made its way into Affinity Photo, enabling you to store and re-use raster and vector content with ease. You also have the ability to import and export your assets with others, speeding up group workflows.
9. Supercharged layer organisation
You can now choose different size options for layer thumbnails, whether thumbnails are on a solid or checkerboard background and you can also use colour tag layers to keep things organised.
10. Alternate futures
Yep, you read that right. Go back in your undo history and branch to create a new future whilst keeping your old edits available. Create multiple branches for different outcomes and quickly switch between them. It’s like having your very own DeLorean for your creative workflow.
11. And that’s not all…
There are so many things to talk about with Affinity Photo 1.7 that we couldn’t fit it in 10 things! It means we haven’t talked about pen and dial support for Surface devices, HDR / EDR monitor support, how HEIF images can now be loaded with their depth maps, and how we’ve added support for 12-bit and 16-bit CMYK TIFF files. Phew!
Affinity Photo is currently 20% off in our store (for a limited time only). You can also try it out for 10 days for free.
Our in-house Affinity Photo guru, James Ritson, has made a plethora of fantastic video tutorials to help you get the most out of Affinity Photo. These are all now available in our new learn section on affinity.serif.com.