Serif: Big Updates For Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo

Serif Labs just announced that both Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo are now available in version 1.7 – both on the Mac app store and their own shop. That’s the biggest update of their professional graphic design and image editing apps to date. Mac users can now use full Metal acceleration and, for the first time, the separate GPU of the Mac. Working with raster layers and brushes will be up to 10 times faster than before. In addition, the apps now support multiple GPUs, both internal and external ones.

Check out their feature highlights:

Affinity Designer 1.7

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)

Affinity Photo 1.7

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