Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer 1.7 are here! It's our biggest update yet with GPU compute acceleration, HDR monitor support and a new memory management system to ensure the Affinity suite. Affinity Photo has become the first choice for photography and creative professionals around the world, who love its speed, power and precision. Whether you are editing and retouching images, or creating full-blown multi-layered compositions, it has all the power and performance you need. Affinity Photo has become the first choice for photography and creative professionals around the world, who love its speed, power and precision. Born to work hand-in-hand with the latest powerful computer technology, it’s the only fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS.
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Description
** Apple Mac App of the Year Winner **
Faster, smoother and more powerful than ever, Affinity Photo continues to push the boundaries for professional photo editing software. With a huge toolset specifically engineered for creative and photography professionals, whether you are editing and retouching images, or creating full-blown multi-layered compositions, it has all the power and performance you will ever need.
Performance and power:
• Live, real time editing
• Massive image support (100+ Megapixels)
• Panning and zooming is always live at 60fps
• Open, edit and save Photoshop® PSD files
• RGB, CMYK, Greyscale and LAB colour spaces
• Full 16 and 32-bit per channel editing
• Work with all standard formats like PNG, TIFF, JPG, GIF, SVG, EPS, EXR, HDR and PDF
Unsurpassed productivity:
• Full support for unlimited layers, layer groups, adjustment layers, filter layers and masks
• Edit live filters, adjustments, effects, blend modes and masks non-destructively
• Undo history can be saved with the document so you can always undo your changes
• Record and play macros for ultimate productivity
Professional image processing:
• Open RAW and other images in a dedicated pre-processing workspace
• Adjust exposure, blackpoint, clarity, vibrance, white balance, shadows, highlights and much more
• Advanced lens corrections including chromatic aberration, defringe, vignette and best-in-class noise reduction
• Paint areas or use fully customisable gradients to mask adjustments
• View histograms, blown highlights, shadows and tones as well as detailed EXIF information
• Focus Merge, HDR Merge and Tone mapping for advanced image processing
Quality retouching and correction tools:
• Intuitive selection brush and refinement makes selections simple, even down to strands of hair
• Instantly remove unwanted objects with an incredibly advanced Inpainting brush
• Dodge, burn, clone, patch, blemish and red eye tools
• Smooth and retouch skin with built-in frequency separation
• Dedicated Liquify persona gives freehand control over warps, twirls, pinch, punch and turbulence
Advanced brush engine:
• Huge library of painting, drawing, textures and professional DAUB® Brushes included
• Create custom brushes and nozzles with full control over advanced dynamics
• Combine multiple brushes together and paint in a single stroke.
• Full support for Wacom and other graphics tablets, including pressure, tilt and shortcut buttons
• Real-time preview of your nozzle – see what you are about to paint or erase before you do it
Fast, customisable effects:
• Massive collection of effects available, including blurs, distortions, tilt-shift, shadows, glows, lighting and many more
• Choose to apply effects non-destructively with live effect layers, enabling you to erase away or mask effects after they have been applied
Built for Mac:
• Takes full advantage of the latest macOS technologies including Metal compute, OpenGL, Grand Central Dispatch and Core Graphics
• Full support for MacBook Pro's Touch Bar and Force Touch trackpad
• Fully optimised for 64-bit and multi-core processors
• Supports regular, retina and multi-monitor set ups
• External eGPU support
What’s New
- Performance and stability improvements.
- Added TGA export.
- Added “Remove Black Matte” and “Remove White Matte” filters.
- Shadows and highlights filter can now use either the 1.6 or 1.7 method.
- Live filter improvements.
- Flood select now works on placed images, and can sample from all layers.
- Flood fill too can now sample from layers beneath - also supports blend modes.
- “D” key resets fills to black & white.
- Japanese IME improvements.
- Numerous bug fixes and small improvements.
No more Photoshop
I had been hesistant to cut off Adobe from taking my money each month but. I am so glad I did, I dove into Affinity Photo and Designer head first and forced myself to take the time to learn their UI. I have to say I am glad I did... I was worried that these apps wouldn't live up to their Adobe competition but I was surprised to see that the developers at Serif have put more though into their UI/UX. Speaking as someone who has developed software, their hard work shows. Don't listen to anyone out there who says this application isn't as good as Photoshop or others. Give it a try and take the time to actually learn how things work and you wont be disappointed. I am finding personally that Affinity is speeding up my workflow and making things less complicated. I especially love that they let me use a caculator on colors right within the app, this is super helpful. Also full screen preview of filters is brilliant. I also picked up the apps for iPad Pro and they are almost 99% the same as the desktop give or take one or two things. It is surprising that a bigger company like Adobe is still lagging bringing their desktop experience to iPad. I am now a true Affinity believer! Thanks Serif!
At the core of everything I do
I have come to love the entire Affinity suite of tools, and can't imagine not having all three apps, since they compliment, and work so seemlessly together. It is where I go first to accomplish everything I want to. I had used Adobe, and Macromedia, and Corel, and Microsoft; but it wasn't until Affinity's structure, workflow and apps that I really got it. I used to struggle with concepts, and I had difficulty comprehending artistic flows in the digital and vector worlds. I seemed dependent upon Corel to do it for me automatically; but try and modify and use a Corel drawing traced automatically; what a nightmare. Affinity gives me the tools to accomplish everything, and really understand why and how I'm doing it. Photoshop tutorials used to just baffle me; why are you doing that, and what the heck are you talking about. Since I jumped in to the Affinity line of Designer, Photo, and Publisher I feel more confident that I can figure out a solution to any task that I can readily take with me and utilize in an unlimited number of variations and scopes. And not to have to be bound by a binding and limiting subscription fee that holds your work hostage from you. I love the Affinity apps, workflow, and empowerment. Thank you.
Excellent editor
I'm an amateur hoping to improve my photo and print editing skills. Retired, my wife and I travel a lot, so most of my photos are travel-related, landscapes, buildings, shorelines, sunsets, etc. In the month or so that I have intensively used this app I find that it is logically structured and intuitive in how the UI works. It’s pretty stable; I have to do something really unnatural to crash it like inadvertently trying to print a 200mb file in a 5x7 format…sigh. It nicely supports my attempts at establishing a consistent workflow. I can easily experiment with alternatives. I struggled trying to understand LR and finally gave up with the new licensing. What I like: 1) the desktop is well organized, logical. Context-appropriate windows work well. 2) adjustment tools are intuitive, easy to apply and back off. 3) nice layer management. 4) fantastic built in help function. it’s an operator’s manual, very complete, virtually a course in itself. 5) The app seems to support almost any image storage organization I choose. Nice.
Haven’t played around with the macros or special effects as yet. Just starting to shoot raw, so can't say anything about is raw format processing. Stay tuned
Information
OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor
English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish
Family Sharing
With Family Sharing set up, up to six family members can use this app.
The name Serif has been synonymous with budget-priced, Windows-based desktop publishing, image-editing and vector drawing programs for the last couple of decades.
Of these, PhotoPlus X8 is the latest version of Serif's competent photo-editing package, which includes helpful learning guides for beginners and some advanced tools, including layer-based editing, for more seasoned users. However, it doesn't cross the bridge from amateur to pro-grade solution – and again, it's only available for Windows PCs.
Affinity Photo is something altogether new and entirely different. It's been developed over the last six years purely for Macs – indeed, there's still no Windows development waiting in the wings. It's also vastly more 'professional' than any other Serif program to date, going head-to-head with the industry-standard, full-blown edition of Adobe Photoshop.
As a result, what Affinity Photo lacks in beginner-friendliness, it makes up for in top-end features and a power-packed, fully customisable interface.
Adding to the attraction, Serif has also developed a companion graphic design package for the Mac, which goes by the name of Affinity Designer. Images for both programs share the same file format, and are therefore fully interchangeable.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Affinity Photo is its price. Whereas mid-range programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 and Corel Paintshop Pro Ultimate X8 cost around £80/$100/AU$130, Affinity Photo 1.4 is just half the price, at £39.99/$49.99/AU$79.99.
Considering that two major upgrades have already been delivered for free since Affinity Photo went on sale, the price stacks up very well compared to the Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan, which combines Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC in a monthly subscription and works out to about £100/$120/AU$120 per year.
So what exactly does Affinity Photo give you for your money?
Meet the cast
The main players in Affinity are a set of modules called 'personas'. These include the Photo, Liquify, Develop and Export personas, each of which has its own dedicated workspace. However, they go above and beyond mere workspaces, with each bringing to the stage its own set of tools and modes of operation.
For processing raw files, your first stop will be the Develop persona. Support for new cameras and lenses is being continuously added, with updates to the program so far being free for users. The control panel has a wealth of tools arranged in tabs for Basic, Lens, Details, Tones and Overlays.
In the Basic tab, for example, you'll get access to exposure, black point and brightness adjustments, enhancements for contrast, clarity, saturation and vibrance, white balance and tint tools, shadows and highlight adjustments and options to add your own presets to the default settings.
Moving along the tabs, the Lens corrections include chromatic aberration and defringing tools, as well as distortion, rotation, horizontal/vertical perspective and vignetting corrections. The Details section adds sharpening refinements and noise control, while Tones contains curves, black & white conversion and split toning adjustments.
The main raw processing tools are many, varied and powerful, and there are additional tools arranged in a vertical button strip down the left-hand side, for things like removal of red-eye and blemishes.
Once you've finished in the Develop persona you may feel that your image is ready to go and needs no further work. In this case you can go directly to the Export persona, where you'll find a wealth of options for outputting images in 8-bit or 16-bit colour depth, in a variety of file formats.
A compatibility bonus when sharing files with other people is that Affinity Photo can directly import and export Photoshop PSD files, complete with full layer support.
Picture this
The real power of the program resides in the Photo persona. Non-destructive alterations are readily available via layer adjustments, which include just about everything you could think of, from brightness and contrast to white balance, colour balance, vibrance and beyond.
Fully automatic corrections include auto levels, auto contrast, auto colours and auto white balance (even for JPEG files).
The Photo persona also has a vertical strip of tools arranged down the left-hand side, most of which have further pop-out options. For example, the Healing Brush tool set includes the regular healing brush and additional tools for patching, blemish removal and red-eye removal, plus a context-aware Inpainting tool that does an excellent job of removing objects from a scene and intelligently filling the space to blend in with the surroundings.
Finally, the Liquify persona hosts an array of pinch, push, twirl and turbulence tools, complete with mesh view and the ability to freeze or thaw selected areas of the image. The speed and fluidity with which edits are updated on screen is particularly impressive.
Alive and kicking
That speed is on show throughout Affinity Photo. Not only are the editing tools very good, with excellent fine-tuning and customisation options, they're also super-fast in action.
Most adjustments can be previewed live, in real time and without any lag, even if you're working on images with huge numbers of layers. This makes the editing process wonderfully fluid, and enhances the creative experience.
The 'live' aspect of watching images update as you work on them extends to customisable effects that include lighting, blurring, tilt & shift, and many more. It's great to be able to get instant feedback on adjustments, which can also be applied as 'live layers'.
Affinity Photo Download
The same immediate, constantly updating previews also apply to live layer blends, for which 30 options are available. Similarly, live filters offer instant previews and non-destructive application.
Similar speed and dexterity is available when retouching images, using tools like dodge and burn, clone, blemish removal and red-eye fix. The latest 2015 edition of Photoshop CC offers a noticeable speed increase over previous versions when using its healing, spot healing and patch tools but, even so, Affinity Photo has the edge.
For ultimate control, you can create custom brushes and nozzles with advanced flow dynamics, and there's built-in support for Wacom and other graphics tablets.
New tricks
For more extreme adjustments, single-plane and dual-plane perspective corrections are easy to apply, and there's also a customisable mesh system for applying warps, again in real time. The latest V1.4 brings yet more fun to the party, with new additions like panoramic photo stitching, live stacks, a haze removal filter and split toning, plus a whole lot more.
Working outside the box, so to speak, V1.4 also adds six extensions for the Apple Photos app. These enable you to use powerful tools from Affinity Photo within the Photos app, including develop, haze removal, liquefy, miniature, monochrome and retouch.
If there's a flaw in Affinity Photo, it's that the seamless support of Photoshop image files (including complex layered files), doesn't yet quite extend to plug-ins. Some work fine, others don't, but it's an area in which Serif have been making strides to ensure greater compatibility with existing third-party plug-ins, and a growing range of new ones.
Affinity Photo Mac Manual Pdf
Also, much like Photoshop itself, image organisation and cataloguing tools are basic in the extreme. In this respect, the Serif program could do with a companion app along the lines of Lightroom.
Verdict
Affinity Photo Mac Manual 2016
Overall, Affinity Photo is a fabulous program that really does rival the best professional and enthusiast-level image-editing packages on the market. It easily takes the lead over previous Serif programs that we've seen for PC, and is a worthy winner of Apple's 'Mac App of the Year' award, 2015.
As with most photo-editing programs, a 30-day free trial version is available. Try it – you'll love it. And when you can't give it up after a month, you'll also be pleased that it's so 'affordable'.