Affinity 3.2 landed on April 16, 2026, just one month after the 3.1 update. Canva’s development pace seems to have picked up since making Affinity free, and this release is the most substantial one yet for photographers.
Most of the coverage out there walks through every feature across all three Studios. This article doesn’t do that. If you’re here, you’re a photographer who wants to know which of these changes will actually affect how you edit your photos. That’s what we’ll talk about.
Table of Contents
The Big Story: Real Masking in the RAW Processor
This is the headline feature for photographers.
Affinity’s Develop Studio (the RAW processing environment) now supports four new mask types: Object Selection, Luminosity, Hue Range, and Compound. If you’ve been using ACR, or Lightroom’s masking tools and were wondering when Affinity would catch up, this is the update that closes much of that gap. They’re not quite the same though.
Object Selection uses AI-assisted detection to identify and mask subjects directly in the RAW processor. Select a person, an animal, or a prominent object without leaving Develop Studio. Previously, doing this required committing to a pixel edit and working in Photo Studio. Now you can make the selection, apply adjustments, and stay in the non-destructive RAW environment. The initial object detection takes a few seconds on my Apple M3 Pro powered laptop, but thereafter object selection is quite fast.
Luminosity Masks let you target specific tonal ranges. Want to pull detail out of shadows without blowing highlights? Want to add contrast to midtones without touching the rest of the image? Luminosity masking makes this possible at the RAW stage. Landscape photographers will find this especially useful for handling high dynamic range scenes without resorting to HDR merges or graduated filters.
Hue Range Masks isolate specific color ranges for targeted adjustment. Shift a sky from pale to deep blue without affecting skin tones. Pull warmth into autumn foliage without shifting the entire color balance. Adjust the green channel in a landscape without touching the browns and grays around it. Color-specific control like this is something Lightroom users have had for a while. Having it in Affinity’s RAW processor is overdue and welcome.
Compound Masks combine multiple mask types into a single, layered mask. Start with an Object Selection, then narrow it by luminosity range, then refine further by hue. This is where the new masking system becomes genuinely powerful. Instead of making broad adjustments and hoping for the best, you can build precise, multi-condition masks that target exactly what you need.
Why Masks Matter
Before this update, serious masking work in Affinity meant leaving Develop Studio and entering Photo Studio. That’s a one-way trip. Once you commit to a pixel edit, you lose the flexibility of the RAW processing environment. These new masks let you do more of your work before that commitment, which means more flexibility and less destructive editing.
This doesn’t make Affinity’s RAW processor equal to Lightroom’s. Lightroom’s masking ecosystem is more mature, with better edge detection and a wider range of AI-assisted selection options. But the gap just got significantly smaller, and for photographers who prefer Affinity’s pixel editing tools for their final work, being able to do more at the RAW stage is a meaningful improvement.
Texture Filter: The Detail Tool You Didn’t Know You Needed
The new Texture filter enhances fine surface detail in the midtones of an image without the harshness that traditional sharpening introduces. Think about fabric weave, skin texture, stone grain, wood bark, or the surface of a leaf.
If you’ve used Lightroom’s Texture slider, this fills a similar role. It’s not sharpening in the traditional sense. It’s not clarity. It’s a targeted enhancement of fine, mid-frequency detail that makes surfaces look more tactile without creating halos or artifacts. You’ll have to try it out to really understand it.
I think that this is more of a finishing tool, not a rescue tool. It works best on images that are already well-exposed and properly focused. Applied subtly, it adds a dimensionality that’s hard to achieve with sharpening alone. Applied heavily, it looks overcooked, like every other detail enhancement tool when pushed too far. Use with a skilled hand.
Sharpening Gets More Granular
The Multi Band Sharpen filter now includes a Fine Detail option, giving you more control over which spatial frequencies get sharpened.
In practical terms, this means you can sharpen fine texture (eyelashes, fabric threads, feather barbs) without simultaneously over-sharpening broader edges and contours.
Combined with the new Texture filter, Affinity now offers a more layered approach to detail enhancement.
Use the Texture filter for midtone surface detail. Use Multi Band Sharpen with Fine Detail for output sharpening. They serve different purposes and work well together.
RAW Processing Quality-of-Life Improvements
A handful of smaller updates to Develop Studio that are easy to overlook but genuinely useful in daily editing:
Tone curve method selection when opening RAW files. You can now choose how the initial tone curve is applied, giving you more control over your starting point before you begin editing.
Persistent settings. Sharpening and tone curve preferences now carry over between sessions. Previously, these reverted to defaults every time you opened a new file. Small fix, real time savings if you have a preferred starting configuration.
Focus Peaking. A visual overlay in Develop Studio that highlights areas of sharp focus. This is invaluable for evaluating whether you nailed focus before committing to a full edit. No more zooming to 100% and scrolling around the frame to check.
Improved panorama, merge, and stack operations. These now use your currently set develop process, rather than reverting to defaults. If you’ve dialed in your preferred RAW processing approach, it now carries through to these operations.
Astrophotography Updates
If you shoot night skies, Affinity 3.2 adds auto stretch for astrophotography images, improved FIT stacking controls, and better color mapping. These are niche features, but for the photographers who need them, they fill gaps that previously required dedicated astrophotography software.
Capture One Integration
Capture One can now export .af files directly into Affinity, preserving layers, masks, metadata, annotations, overlays, and guides in a single click.
This is a workflow integration, not a feature within Affinity itself. But if you use Capture One for culling and initial grading, then move to Affinity for retouching and compositing, this eliminates the manual rebuild that previously ate up your time. No more exporting a flattened TIFF and recreating your masks from scratch.
One caveat: this is Mac only at launch. Windows support hasn’t been announced yet.
If you use Lightroom instead of Capture One, this integration doesn’t affect you. There’s no equivalent Lightroom-to-Affinity workflow at this time.
DaVinci Resolve Integration
Affinity .af files can now be opened natively in DaVinci Resolve as title cards, video overlays, and annotations. When you update and save the .af file in Affinity, Resolve picks up the changes automatically. No re-exporting, no relinking.
This matters if you also do video work. If you create lower thirds, branded overlays, or title cards for client deliverables or social media content, this is a genuine time saver. If you don’t work with video, you can skip this entirely.
These app integrations are crucial for more widespread usage of Affinity (both the app and the file format), and this is a good sign for the future, in my opinion. Designers and photographers will benefit from more widespread integration of .af file formats, both as an export and as an import file format.
Claude AI Automation
Affinity now includes an AI connector for Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant). The idea is that you describe a repetitive task in plain language, and Claude builds a reusable script that runs inside Affinity. Examples include batch renaming layers, print preparation, adding borders, and batch resizing.
The connector is free during the beta period. You’ll need a separate Anthropic account to use it.
Worth being honest here: community feedback so far suggests this is early-stage technology. It works for simple, well-defined tasks. It struggles with anything complex or nuanced. One reviewer noted it took 30 minutes to produce a mediocre result for a task that would take 30 seconds to do manually. In my own testing, it took a good while just to add some text to an image.
The potential is real. Automating tedious batch work is exactly the kind of thing AI should be doing for photographers. Or should it?
But this isn’t a production-ready tool yet. Experiment with it, don’t plan your workflow around it though.
Canva Brand System
Canva Brand Kits (approved colors, fonts, imagery, and brand voice) are now accessible directly inside Affinity. This is useful for commercial photographers and studio owners who deliver branded client work and need to stay consistent across deliverables.
This requires a paid Canva subscription (Pro at $144/year or Business at $250/year, both of which have increased since March). The core Affinity application remains free.
Cavalry: Free Motion Design
Cavalry, a 2D motion design and animation tool, is now free with a Canva account. This is tangential to photography, but worth knowing about if you create motion graphics for social media, animated thumbnails, or short-form video content. I’ve not gotten around to using it as yet.
What Came in 3.1 (March 2026)
We didn’t write about the last update, so here’s what was added in version 3.1:
Light UI theme. A brighter workspace option for photographers who find the default dark interface hard on the eyes during long editing sessions. Fully adjustable brightness, so you can dial it to your preference.
Live Tone Blend Groups. A compositing feature that simplifies blending images into backplate images. Useful for composite work and creative edits.
Tone Brush. Paint tonal adjustments directly onto your image as new layers. A more intuitive approach to localized tonal work.
Convert selections to curves. Turn a pixel selection into a vector path. Primarily useful for designers, but also handy for creating precise masks from rough selections.
Right-click brush menu. Instant access to your full brush library without navigating panels. Small change, real workflow improvement.
Right-click document tab menu. Quickly check color format and document size, close other files, or float a window. Another small quality-of-life improvement that adds up over a full editing session.
Pricing: Still Free Where It Counts
The core Affinity application remains free on Windows and macOS. It’s still very usable without having to pay anything. You just need a free Canva account to download it. There is no subscription required to use the photo editing, vector design, or page layout tools.
The paid subscription (Canva Pro at $144/year or Business at $250/year) unlocks the AI tools inside Affinity and the Canva Brand System integration. For most photographers working on personal projects, the free tier is more than sufficient.
The Bottom Line
The masking update is the reason to care about Affinity 3.2.0. Object Selection, Luminosity, Hue Range, and Compound masks in the RAW processor bring Affinity meaningfully closer to Photoshop and Lightroom’s masking capabilities, and they do it without requiring you to leave the non-destructive editing environment. If you’ve been holding off on Affinity because its RAW processing felt underpowered compared to Lightroom, this is worth a second look.
The Texture filter and sharpening improvements are solid additions for fine-tuning output quality. The Capture One integration is a genuine workflow improvement for the photographers who use both tools. Everything else is either niche (astrophotography, DaVinci Resolve), early-stage (Claude AI), or aimed at a different audience (Brand Kits, Cavalry). This is a substantial update, and one that expands usability in a meaningful way for photographers.
Affinity is free. The update is automatic. If you’re already using it, open it up and try the new masks. If you’re not, there’s never been a lower barrier to finding out whether it fits your workflow.
