MAJOR UPDATE
What’s New in the Affinity Suite V2?
Each of the apps in Serif’s creative suite—Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher—is a powerhouse in its own right. But they’re even better together, with tight integration that, for example, lets you use Photo’s image-editing features within Publisher while putting together a newsletter. Instead of moving assets between apps and worrying about which custom brush is saved where, you can focus on creating.
Version 2 of the suite brings major new features to each app while reinforcing how well they work together. Here’s a look at a few of the ways the Affinity apps have leveled up.
New across the suite
All three apps sport a refreshed interface that’s even easier to use. For example, when working on a pixel layer, click the brush icon to bring up a menu of the brushes you’ve used on that layer—useful for making sure your touch-ups blend in. The revamped Layers panel uses easily recognizable icons to identify each layer type (like text or curve). And improved drop zones simplify actions like moving a layer inside another layer.
It’s also easier to use brushes, assets, swatches, and styles across the apps. Linking a category of custom brushes in Affinity Photo, for instance, makes them instantly available across the suite, so you can use those brushes to work on an image in Affinity Publisher.
The suite has also seen big upgrades to raw support: You can place an unedited raw image in any of the apps and tweak it using Serif’s powerful Develop Persona tools—including overlays like linear gradients—without jumping back to Affinity Photo.
Pro tip: Reduce the size of your Publisher and Designer documents by inserting raw images as linked files instead of embedding them. (You can still make edits in each app using the Develop tools.)
New in Affinity Photo
Speaking of improvements to raw support, Affinity Photo now lets you nondestructively edit raw images in live Develop layers: Instead of having to apply adjustments and then bake them into a pixel layer, you can simply change the Develop settings as needed—and see the results in real time.
Photo also now offers compound masks—separate mask layers that can interact with each other nondestructively using add/subtract/intersect/XOR options. New Live Masks can isolate areas based on hue, luminosity, and more, letting you precisely target adjustments. And mock-ups are easier than ever now that you can turn the Mesh Warp feature—which lets you distort an image to match the shape of a template, such as a book cover—into a live layer to fix or replace an image while keeping the existing mesh intact.
New in Affinity Designer
The latest Affinity Designer adds more ways to quickly edit and create vector objects: Carve up any shape, text, or curve using the Knife tool, or apply the new Shape Builder tool to a collection of overlapping shapes to interactively add and subtract segments.
Want to stretch points and paths in complex ways? The new Vector Warp nondestructively applies a live mesh you can use to bend even complicated artwork composed of thousands of shapes. And the new X-Ray view mode presents a wireframe with color context, making it simple to drill down to the specific paths you want to manipulate.
New in Affinity Publisher
It all comes together on the publishing side, where Affinity Publisher can handle large projects faster than ever—including books comprising multiple Publisher projects. When building such books, the app ensures consistent styles and page numbering, and even generates an overall table of contents and index.
The new Format Dropper makes it easy to achieve a consistent look: Sample the style of some text or an object, then “drop” that style onto any other text or object. And the new Notes tool makes it easy to add footnotes, end notes, and side notes to sections of text, properly flowing the surrounding text while making sure notes stay on the correct page when you change the layout or add objects.