Affinity’s suite of image editing and designer apps, Publisher, Designer, and Photo, all updated for Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices this week.
This update, referred to as the 1.10 Update, focuses mainly on performance and dramatically increases speed, asset loading, and processing speed in all three apps.
“The first area of focus has been memory management in Affinity Publisher,” a post on the official Affinity blog explains. “This has had a complete re-write, and now enables huge documents—even with thousands of pages and many gigabytes’ worth of linked images—to offer instant loading times, smooth live editing and super-fast scroll, pan and zoom across whole files.
“In Affinity Designer, our main area of focus was the rendering engine and seeing how we could improve the handling of highly complex documents, potentially with hundreds of thousands of objects or layers.”
Affinity Photo also receive a significant boost with a focus on layers and how they were blended. “This new approach gives options to maintain slick performance even after building up highly complex compositions—all while retaining a non-destructive workflow,” the blog explains.
Here’s the release notes for Affinity Publisher that break down the specifics of the improvements made with this update:
- Windows hardware (GPU) acceleration (for users running Windows 10 (April 2020 update or later) with a Direct3D feature level 12.0 capable card)
- Much faster IDML import
- Studio presets for the UI layout to save your favourite workspace setups for different tasks
- PDF passthrough
- Divide blend mode
- Flattened bitmap representation used for all PSD files
- Package feature to collate your document alongside all used image and font resources into a folder
- Convert pixel layer to image node
- Data merge
- Path text improvements
- Initial text baseline advance
- Configurable bleed and margin guide colours
- Artboard conversion to spreads now optional
- Placed scale for all placed files, which allows scaling to be reset to 100%
- Curves numeric field controls
- Blend modes for mask layers
- PDF bookmarks
- Content sync of store purchases
- Many other improvements and fixes
Here’s the Affinity Photo release notes:
- Windows hardware (GPU) acceleration (for users running Windows 10 (April 2020 update or later) with a Direct3D feature level 12.0 capable card)
- RAW improvements and support for the latest cameras
- Studio presets for the UI layout
- Linked images and resource manager
- Path text capabilities and improvements
- Edit spare channels as layers
- Divide blend mode
- PDF passthrough
- Snap to pixel selection bounds
- Create brushes from current pixel selection
- Elliptical marquee automatically creates from centre
- Configurable bleed and margin guide colours
- Placed scale for all placed files, which allows scaling to be reset to 100%
- Curves numeric field controls
- Blend modes for mask layers
- Add live liquify layer
- Linked layers
- Pattern layers
- Stacking improvements for astrophotography
- Content sync of store purchases
- Benchmarking option to measure speed of your device
- Use filters on masks
- Many other improvements and fixes
And here’s the release notes for the Affinity Designer update:
- Windows hardware (GPU) acceleration (for users running Windows 10 (April 2020 update or later) with a Direct3D feature level 12.0 capable card)
- Contour tool
- Select Same
- Select Object
- Studio presets for the UI layout
- Linked images and resource manager
- Divide blend mode
- PDF passthrough
- Package feature to collate your document alongside all used image and font resources into a folder
- Path text improvements
- Configurable bleed and margin guide colours
- Placed scale for all placed files, which allows scaling to be reset to 100%
- Curves numeric field controls
- Snap to pixel selection bounds
- Blend modes for mask layers
- Create brushes from current pixel selection
- Elliptical marquee automatically creates from centre
- Content sync of store purchases
- Hierarchical control of antialiasing
- Many other improvements and fixes
All three Affinity apps are incredibly solid alternatives to Adobe’s various designer and photography services. Each features professional-grade editing and production tools and, unlike Adobe, doesn’t require the purchase of a new version every few years or a subscription to a pricey membership.
All owners of Affinity Publisher, Photo, and Designer get all future updates completely for free.
Are you an Affinity user? Let us know if you’ve noticed any major improvements with this update in the comments below and then follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more Windows app update news.
