Serif today announced across-the-board updates for its popular suite of Affinity creative apps, including Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and the Apple award-winning Affinity Publisher for Mac, all of which were among the first professional creative suites to be optimized for Apple's new M1 chip.
"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 Affinity developer 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."
Affinity Designer, the graphic design app, has gained a new contour tool to add contours and line offsets to any shape or path. Also added is the ability to place linked images and resources, which works to reduce file size and simplify collaborative working.
In Affinity Publisher, IDML import is said to be noticeably faster, while a new Package feature allows users to bundle all the image and font resources from a project into a folder, which can then be transferred easily to another system to aid collaboration or for print production.
In addition, placed PDFs can now be set to "passthrough," which ensures 100% fidelity on export, and users can easily integrate text and image links into a document from an external data source with the new data merge feature.
Over in Affinity Photo, users can now add liquify adjustments as live, maskable layers as part of their non-destructive workflow. There are also "substantial" improvements to its RAW engine, new linked layer functionality, path text, and a new mode to control the stacking of astrography images.
The 1.9 update is available across all Affinity apps on macOS, Windows and iPad from today and is free to existing users. All Affinity apps are currently available on the Affinity website with a 50% discount as an initiative to support the creative community during the global health crisis.
