Nottingham, United Kingdom – Serif is delighted to announce that its highly-anticipated professional image editing app for Mac, Affinity Photo, is now available as a free download for public beta testing. Setting a benchmark by achieving Apple’s Best of 2014 (App of the Year) runner-up with Affinity Designer, Serif’s Affinity Photo follows up by giving professional photographers blistering performance, highly accurate tools and a fresh workflow. Affinity Photo is built using Mac technologies on top of an advanced image-processing engine that is professional to its core. Affinity Photo boasts true end-to-end CMYK, 16-bits per channel editing, LAB colour, RAW processing, ICC colour management, and fantastic Adobe(R) Photoshop(R) PSD and 64-bit plug-in compatibility.
Although a first beta version, it is already feature-rich with pro photography adjustments like Frequency Separation editing, live blend modes, Inpainting, and advanced retouching – in task-focused, uncluttered workspaces. Lossless editing introduces a streamlined professional workflow with scaling, cropping, blurs and other popular edits maintaining original image quality. It’s non-destructive yet incredibly fast.
“We’re delighted to be shaking things up with this exciting new app that doesn’t compromise on power and could make creative pros fall in love with photo editing and raster art all over again. Affinity Photo is silky-smooth, accurate at a professional level, and fully-featured – and the beta can be downloaded for free.” says Ashley Hewson, Serif’s Managing Director. He continues “Affinity Photo also joins the award-winning Affinity Designer as part of a brilliant creative suite with seamless switching between apps, one file format, and a common Undo history. Even as a beta and with the suite still growing, there’s nothing else quite like it.”
Tony Brightman, head of Affinity development adds “We directly targeted professionals when we dreamt up the Affinity range, making performance, reliability, pro-level tools and a slick workflow our top priorities. It’s early days for the Affinity Photo beta, but with the welcome help of our professional users during the test phase we’ll be able to fully deliver on these aims for launch and with free updates afterwards. I’m also very happy to say to all photographers and creatives, when Affinity Photo launches it’ll be a one-time purchase – we don’t do subscriptions.”
The Affinity development team is engaging directly with creatives to bring the polish to their apps that is required of a range of professional workflows. Tony concludes “We want as many people as possible to use the free Affinity Photo beta for their photo editing and creative raster work – feedback from the public beta will make the differences that really matter in a professional setting. Download and install Affinity Photo on your Mac, enjoy getting your hands dirty with some editing, then please join the conversation on our forums.”
The free beta version of Affinity Photo is available to download now. It’s compatible with OS X Lion 10.7.5 and newer on Intel 64 Macs, and is in English, German, Spanish and French. Guidelines and discussions can be found on the Affinity Forum. After launch Affinity Photo will be available exclusively through the Mac App Store for just GBP39.99 / Euro49.99 / $49.99 (subject to App Store matrix adjustments) with no ongoing subscription charges. Contact Dale Cook for more information or content, or Ash Hewson with corporate enquiries.
Affinity Photo
Beta Signup
Discussion Forum
Vimeo Video (Promo)
Press Kit (zip)
Serif was founded in 1987, and through its history has launched many award winning graphics software for Windows. 5 years ago Serif set out to produce an entirely new range of professional graphic applications for Mac under a new brand called Affinity. Affinity Designer (vector drawing) was released in October 2014, and is being followed by Affinity Photo in the spring of 2015 and Affinity Publisher early 2016. Serif has 130 employees at its head office, development and European sales centre in Nottingham, UK. All Material and Software (C) Copyright 1987-2015 Serif. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac OS X and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks and registered trademarks may be the property of their respective owners.