Serif Affinity

Affinity is a line of professional creative, applications from productive ON for editing photos and graphic design to functional software for editorial and publishing.

2021: Affinity 1.10

On August 5, 2021, Serif announced the release of Affinity 1.10. Updates in version 1.10 affected the software kernel itself.

According to the company, the fully rewritten memory management features in Affinity Publisher allow the application to work with large documents containing thousands of pages and many gigabytes of related images, while quickly downloading files, smooth dynamic editing, fast scrolling, and panning and scaling the entire document.

We were amazed to see the scale of some of the projects created by our customers at Affinity Publisher and realized that we can make even more efforts to keep the application running at the right speed even under the maximum permissible loads. We have completely transformed the architecture responsible for working with memory, and now users no longer have restrictions on the size of the document they can work with. told Ashley Hewson, Managing Director, Serif Product Development, Affinity

Large document processing (even with thousands of pages and images) has now reached a whole new level of performance

The rendering module in Affinity Designer has also been redesigned, so that the application can process complex documents (even containing hundreds of thousands of objects) almost 10 times faster.

Although projects containing hundreds or thousands of objects are quite rare, they still exist. In addition, we often see Designer import PDF documents (usually with files created in CAD or a similar application), and in such cases the number of objects can easily reach similar values. Updating this level is especially noticeable when working with large documents, but even less complex projects will now be processed faster and more smoothly. supplemented by Hewson

Documents with hundreds of thousands of layers are now processed ten times faster

Affinity Photo has also undergone many performance-related edits: the most important change was the optimization of performance when overlaying layers while preserving a non-destructive workflow - a key feature of Affinity Photo, which distinguishes this software from its counterparts.

As part of the updated approach, the user is also offered the ability to maintain the editing speed at an appropriate level even when creating a complex stack of hundreds of pixel and vector layers using filter effects, while the available layer stack functionality will not be affected.

In addition to fundamental performance changes, the import of IDML for Affinity Publisher was quadrupled, text placement was almost doubled, and many other edits and stability changes were implemented.

Affinity 1.10 is already available on the Affinity website.

2020: Affinity Publisher/Photo/Designer version 1.8

On February 26, 2020, Serif released updated versions of Affinity applications. Affinity Publisher 1.8 adds support for importing IDML files, pre-rasterization validation, template support, and document merge.

According to the company, this update is mainly aimed at companies and professional users, for whom it is important to have access to many documents in old formats - now the process of switching to the Affinity application will become easier for them.

The need for a simple way to import existing documents was InDesign a serious constraint, especially for companies with a large directory of old files, so we are very happy to add support for importing IDML files, which will simplify the process of migrating to our application package as much as possible. told Ashley Hewson, Managing Director of Serif

Among the features of Affinity Publisher:

• A complete pre-rasterization check procedure that will report any possible errors in the document in real time, such as low resolution, possible bleed, text overflow, spelling errors, missing images or fonts, etc.
• You can save documents as templates for reuse in future projects.
• The ability to combine multiple Affinity Publisher documents into a single file by intelligently merging master pages, text styles, tables of contents, and indexes.
• Import files Excel (xlsx) to instantly integrate spreadsheets. data
• Many other improvements and fixes, including improved export to a format PDF that is now up to five times faster.
• Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer were also upgraded to version 1.8, which allows you to save a single file format for all applications, which also supports StudioLink technology. The latter allows you to access the Designer and Photo tools directly from the Affinity Publisher interface.

Other features added for February 2020 include:

• Importing PSD files now supports Smart Objects, allowing you to retain full layer resolution and editability within any object.
• The Affinity Designer adds a panel for instantly searching and dragging stock images into a project.
• Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for iPad have been supported for custom keyboard shortcuts in the same way as for Windows and Mac applications.
• Affinity Photo is now fully compatible with the Nik Collection plugins, which is the result of a collaboration between Affinity developers and DxO, which owns the Nik plugin package.