Nottingham, United Kingdom – Serif has today announced the first major update to its revolutionary professional image editor, Affinity Photo, and to celebrate is also offering a one-week 20% discount in the Mac App Store. First released in July, Affinity Photo has already gained a formidable reputation offering high end professional tools, incredible speed, and rock solid stability. The fact it’s also offered at a low price, with no subscription to pay for, has made it very popular with photographers-regularly topping the Mac App Store charts, and receiving 1000s of 5-star ratings on the store worldwide.
Despite there being no subscription fee, Serif has always promised to release regular free updates to the app for at least the first couple of years, and although some minor improvements have already been pushed this is the first time a significant number of new features have been added. One area of all-new technology the app is boasting is super accurate image alignment. This has opened up two new major new features of panorama stitching and image stacks.
“The accuracy of panorama stitching in the app really is as good as it gets-and with Affinity Photo’s advanced memory management you can build up images of 100s of mega-pixels and still have incredible performance when you go to edit,” said Ashley Hewson, Serif’s Managing Director. “Then we’ve got image stacks – from simply removing an unwanted moving object from multiple shots to advanced techniques like layering multi-exposure composites, they add a whole new dimension to what is possible in the app.”
Another big addition has been the inclusion of six extensions for Apple Photos, opening up some of Affinity’s technology directly from within the Apple app. The extensions included are:
* Develop – with full RAW editing capability
* Liquify – for warping and re-sculpting areas of images
* Haze Removal – intelligently removing fog, mist and smog
* Miniature – for depth of field and tilt shift adjustments
* Monochrome – offering fine control over black and white conversion
* Retouch – including a full suite of retouching tools and smart pixel selection
“Opening up the ability for developers to produce extensions for Photos was a big part of the El Capitan update, and it’s been fun writing for it,” said Ashley. “While Affinity Photo is a very robust professional product and will always stay that way, extensions allow us to expose some of that power in a more use-case focused way for quick and easy editing.”
Other Apple technology has been harnessed, too-in particular fully supporting the extended-gamut DCI-P3 displays found in the latest iMacs, giving a depth of colour to images beyond what was possible before. Other new features and improvements include canvas rotation, PDF/X and spot colour support, customisable keyboard shortcuts, additions to filters, adjustment layers and blend modes, and significant improvements to PSD compatibility.
The developers have had an incredibly busy end to the year, as not only have they been preparing the update to Affinity Photo, they have also launched an update to their Apple Designer Award-winning app Affinity Designer today. Designer now includes artboards, along with lots of new professional print features. Launching both updates at the same time ensures both apps remain fully compatible with each other.
Device Requirements:
* OS X 10.7 or later
* 64-bit processor
* 276 MB
Pricing and Availability:
Both updates are available now, free to owners of each app via the Mac App Store. For new customers they are available at the special offer price of just GBP 29.99/Euro 39.99/$39.99 each until December 15th, after which they revert to the normal price of GBP 39.99/Euro 49.99/$49.99 (USD).
Affinity Photo 1.4
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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. Built exclusively for Mac with the power and sophistication the platform offers, and driven by creative designers from the outset, Affinity is the new name in high quality, next-generation design apps for professionals. Conceived and developed by a passionate team of artists and programmers, Affinity gives designers exactly what they need for the highest quality artwork, photos and designs – accurate, high quality tools in fast, innovative, reliable apps with flair. 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.