Affinity developer Serif released version 1.9 of its apps, a major free update that offers a series of features, including a new persona for astrophotography that will appeal to night sky photographers.

The invitation is clear: experience new levels of creativity with the Affinity apps, as Serif, the developer of the “Affinity Suite” – the package including Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher – announces version 1.9, bringing new features and significant further improvements. One note for those on the fence about buying the product: all Affinity apps are currently available with 50% discount as an initiative to support the creative community during Covid-19. This means that with $75 you can take the whole Affinity Suite home. The deal is available worldwide.

If you’re not sure, yet, about the value of the package, the 90-day trial that is now offered by Serif, to support creatives during this pandemic, will allow you to test the apps and decide. So, why wait? Ashley Hewson, Managing Director of Affinity developer Serif, says about the introduction of version 1.9: “After another year which saw record numbers of people switching to Affinity, it’s exciting to start 2021 with yet another major free update.”

Publisher and Designer updates

Serif claims that “from the smoothest, fastest photo editing and graphic design to the most powerful publishing software, Affinity continues to set new standards for creative software” and Ashley Hewson, adds that “we’re introducing more tools and functions which will enable artists, designers, photographers and editors with even the most complex workflows to take advantage of the speed and power of Affinity.”

Affinity Designer, the graphic design app, gets a new contour tool which offers an incredibly intuitive way to add contours and line offsets to any shape or path. Also added is the ability to place linked images and resources, reducing file size and simplifying collaborative working.

In Affinity Publisher, IDML import will be noticeably faster and the new Package feature allows users to bundle all the image and font resources from a project into a folder which can be transferred easily to another system to aid collaboration or for print production.

A persona for astrophotography

Placed PDFs can now be set to ‘passthrough’ ensuring 100% fidelity on export, and users can easily integrate text and image links into a document from an external data source with the new data merge feature.

A key feature which sets Affinity Photo apart from the competition is its non-destructive workflow, and that has been taken to another level again with the ability to add liquify adjustments as live, maskable layers. On top of that there are substantial improvements to its RAW engine, new linked layer functionality, path text, as well as a whole new mode to control the stacking of astrophotography images for stunning results.

Windows users will be thrilled to learn that the latest update includes GPU acceleration which, depending on the system (must be running Windows 10 April 2020 update or later with a Direct3D feature level 12.0 capable card), can achieve up to 10x speed improvements on many pixel-based tasks. This brings the Windows versions into line with the GPU acceleration in the macOS and iPad versions of the apps, which were among the first professional creative suites to optimize for the new Apple M1 chip.

The 1.9 update is available across all Affinity apps on macOS, Windows and iPad and is free to existing users. As noted above, all Affinity apps from Serif are currently available with 50% discount as an initiative to support the creative community during Covid-19, from affinity.serif.com.