Affinity Suite v1.10 has been released today and it comes with significant improvements in performance across the board. All three apps that are designed and built by Affinity will see improvements in some form or the other.
Users of Affinity 1.9 apps will be able to upgrade to version 1.10 for free even though these upgrades are expected to be made paid upgrades in the future.
Table of Contents
Improvements in Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer sees significant improvements in rendering highly complex documents, heavily-layer documents, with thousands of objects, placing images, embedding documents, and performance during low memory conditions. The result of their hard work shows in documents that render up to 10 times faster in 1.10 compared to before.
Improvements in Affinity Publisher
Affinity publisher seems to have some of the largest improvements with great performance increases, and a focus on memory management for heavily layered documents, allowing for multiple GB size images to be loaded, embedded documents to work better, and better performance in low memory conditions. Text entry insertion and deletion in long stories and placed PDF set to pass through have also been optimized. These are not the only improvements that Affinity Publisher sees, though … we won’t go into them in this article since we are more interested in the changes that are seen in Affinity Photo.
Improvements in Affinity Photo
Affinity Photo 1.10 brings performance improvements in GPU rendering, panorama stitching, embedding and placing images within affinity photo documents, performance during low memory conditions, flattening of images using the merge visible command, and more.
Of particular interest to me are the improvements in the RAW image processing, with support for ACM lens profiles being added and lens correction improvements for Canon, Tamron, and Sigma lenses also seeing a mention in the list of changes. Version 1.10 also brings in support for Canon CR3 RAW files for Canon EOS 850D and an improved Serif Labs RAW processing engine.
Scroll down for a list of all the improvements in Affinity Photo 1.10. Click here for the full list of features in Affinity Photo.
Performance Improvements in Affinity Photo 1.10
- GPU rendering
- Panorama stitching
- Defringing and increased maximum radius
- Multiple placed Info page samplers
- Adjustment layers when hardware acceleration is disabled
- Heavily layered documents (faster rendering during panning and text reflow)
- Placed images
- Embedded documents
- Low-memory conditions (including Windows OpenCL preventing fallback from hardware to software)
- Converting documents between ICC profiles/pixel formats
- Documents that contain flattened, opaque layers (usually the result of merge visible)
Raw Image Processing Improvements
- Lens Correction improvements for Canon, Tamron, and Sigma lenses
- ACM lens profile support
- Raw CR3 support (for Canon EOS 850D)
- Improved Serif Labs RAW engine
Layers & Masks
- Create a pattern layer from the current selection (iPad)
- Pattern layers can be mirrored (iPad)
Frequency Separation
- Choice of blur methods for Frequency separation
Advanced Gamma Blending, Blend Ranges, and Antialiasing
- Blend ranges use GPU acceleration
Astrophotography Persona (for desktop only)
- Edit stacked image names for better organization
- Stack images for different filters simultaneously using file groups (auto-alignment avoids resampling)
- Open FITS files directly in Photo Persona (control over demosaicing)
- Support for FUJIFILM X-Trans sensor images
Here is a link to the announcement of Affinity Suite 1.10 and an overview of the various improvements.
Click here to try out Affinity Apps for free.
What do you think about Affinity’s focus on performance improvements for version 1.10? I am very pleasantly surprised and very happy to have more performance for the same price.
I think most people would feel the same. Please share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment below.
