Today we launch version 1.9 of Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher, bringing new features and significant further improvements across the board.
“After another year which saw record numbers of people switching to Affinity, it’s exciting to start 2021 with yet another major free update,” said Ashley Hewson, Managing Director of Serif.
“We’re introducing more tools and functions which will enable artists, designers, photographers and editors with even the most complex workflows to take advantage of the speed and power of Affinity.”
Users can expect performance improvements across all apps, including substantial performance gains when working with complex vector documents.
Some highlights of the update include a new Contour Tool for Affinity Designer as well as a Linked Images and Resource Manager—which reduces document file sizes and simplifies collaborative working—for Affinity Designer and Photo.
Affinity Photo also sees its list of supported cameras expanded, plus the addition of the SerifLabs RAW engine to its iPad counterpart, which ensures consistency between how RAW files are developed on desktop and iPad. It also allows for better noise reduction and manual lens corrections, as well as more cropping flexibility.
In Affinity Publisher, IDML import will be noticeably faster and the new Package feature—which is also available in Affinity Designer—allows users to bundle all the image and font resources from a project into a folder, which can be then transferred easily to another system.
It’s also now possible to opt for PDF passthrough in all desktop apps, so an imported PDF can be exported with its original format intact, even if embedded fonts aren’t installed.
Windows users will also be happy to hear that hardware (GPU) acceleration has been added to the Windows versions of the apps, meaning users can expect major performance boosts, especially for pixel-based tasks like filter effects, adjustments and brush performance (must be running Windows 10 (April 2020 update or later) with a Direct3D feature level 12.0 capable card).
An extensive selection of other updates and fixes have also been introduced as part of today’s update. More information on 1.9, including details of the new features and learning resources for each app, can be found in the articles below:
- 5 things you should know about Affinity Designer 1.9
- 5 things you should know about Affinity Photo 1.9
- 5 things you should know about Affinity Publisher 1.9
Existing users can download v1.9 free from their Affinity account.
To learn more about our apps and what they have to offer, visit the Affinity website.