Serif has released a version 1.9 update to the Affinity suite of applications, which includes Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher, a competitor program from Adobe. This free update contains several enhancements, including live plastics, RAW enhancements and GPU acceleration for Windows computers. The software, which runs as part of version 1.9, has undergone many improvements. From user-friendly and productive photo editing and graphic design software to functional editing and publishing software, Affinity applications continue to set new standards for creative software.

Affinity applications are continually improving, as evidenced by today’s launch of version 1.9, with new features and significant additional enhancements.

Ashley Hewson, managing director of Affinity product development at Serif, said: “Another year has seen a record number of people switching to Affinity products, and it’s very exciting to start 2021 with another significant free upgrade. We’re adding more tools and features that will allow artists, designers, photographers and editors in even the most complex workflows to take advantage of the speed and capabilities of Affinity products.”

Affinity Designer introduces a new tool for working with outlines.

The Affinity Designer graphic design app will feature a new path tool that will provide an intuitive way to add paths and line offsets to any shape or outline. In addition, we’ve added the ability to place linked images and resources, reducing file size and making collaboration easier.

In Affinity Publisher, importing IDML files will be noticeably faster, and the new packaging feature will allow users to consolidate all image and font resources from a project into one folder, which can then be easily transferred to another system to facilitate collaboration or print production.

Posted PDF documents can be set to “pass through” for 100% export accuracy, and users can easily integrate text and image links from external data sources into the document thanks to the new data merge feature.

The Affinity Publisher app now has a data merge feature available.

A key feature that allows Affinity Photo to stand out from the competition is the non-destructive workflow, which has again been taken to a whole new level with the ability to add plastic deformation corrections in the form of dynamic masking layers. In addition, we’ve made significant improvements to the RAW file processing module, created new functionality for bound layers, outline text, and a whole new mode for astrophotography overlay that delivers incredible results.

Windows users will be happy to know that the latest update includes GPU acceleration, which can improve the performance of many pixel tasks by a factor of ten (the exact amount of acceleration depends on system specifications). The Windows versions now have the same graphics card acceleration mechanism as the macOS or iPad versions of the apps, which were among the first professional sets of creative apps to be optimized for Apple’s new M1 chip.

The free 1.9 update is available to all macOS, Windows and iPad users of Affinity apps today.