Features of Affinity Designer

Power, performance and compatibility:

• Optimised for:
  • Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)
  • OpenGL
  • Core Graphics
  • Direct3D
  • 64-bit engine
  • GPU hardware acceleration (Metal) for integrated, discrete and external GPUs (macOS 10.13 High Sierra and above)
  • Hardware GPU acceleration (OpenCL) for integrated, discrete and external GPUs
• Create massive gigapixel-sized documents
• 16-bits per channel editing
• Sub-pixel accuracy
• Mac with Apple M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max chip or Intel processor
• OS X Mavericks 10.9 or later (Supported up to macOS Big Sur 11.0)
• 64-bit plug-in support
• Up to date Tablet support
• Multi-touch support
• Surface Studio with Surface Pen and Surface Dial support
• Force Touch support (Magic Trackpad 2/MacBook/MacBook Pro)
• Touch Bar support (MacBook Pro)
• Improved performance (from v1.10) with:
  • Heavily layered documents (faster rendering during panning and text reflow)
  • Placed images
  • Embedded documents
  • Low-memory conditions

Solid graphic design tools:

• Artboards
• Intuitive Move Tool moves, scales, transforms
• Select multiple objects by type, colour, stroke weight, transparency, and more
• Rotate/transform from movable origin
• Customisable nudge distances
• Precise Pen Tool
• Precision straight line length and rotation angle via Transform panel
• Contouring with new Contour Tool
• Arrowheads (and tails)
• Multiple strokes and fills per object
• Node Tool for fine tuning vectors
• Freeform Pencil Tool with Sculpt mode
• Stroke stabiliser for smooth pen, pencil and brush strokes
• Raster finishing without switching apps
• Smooth gradients (skew, scale and planar aware)
• Add noise to fills and strokes as a solid or graduated attribute
• Assets for object storage
• Sort assets by date in Assets panel
• Customisable, saveable stroke styles
• Styles presets

Powerful layer management

• Drag and drop layers
• Non-destructive adjustment layers
• Apply adjustments and blend modes at the stack, layer, group, selection or object level
• Precise node control in Curves adjustment
• Clipping within layers
• Use global colours in Gradient Map adjustments
• Clipping within layers
• High quality layer effects
• Layer effects work with global colours
• Pixel adjustments and effects on vectors
• Blend modes
• Divide blend mode
• Layer and object Blend ranges (linear and non-linear)
• Per-object Blend gamma control
• Per-object hierarchical antialiasing
• Lock child layer positions
• Coloured layer entry tagging for easy identification

External resource management

• Linked resources
• Set embedded/linked resource policy on new document creation
• Resource Manager
• Resource Manager improvements (from v1.10):
  • Relink multiple missing 'same folder' images in one operation
  • Switch on/off columns
  • New File Type column
  • EPS files can be linked
  • Improvements when managing placed documents
• Collect linked resources
• Packaging for project portability

Professional object control

• Symbols
• Corner Tool
• Boolean operations (Add, Subtract, Intersect, Divide, Xor)
• Live-preview non-destructive compounds (Boolean operations)
• Convert shapes and text to fully editable curves
• Duplicate and transform objects with precision
• Transform objects separately
• Point Transform Tool to scale/rotate about movable transform origin
• Customisable geometric shapes
• Select multiple objects by type, colour, stroke weight, transparency, and more
• Multi-node selection using polygon or freehand (lasso) drawing
• Multi-node selection, alignment and transform
• Control handle snapping to angles and distances

Professional colour support

• 16-bits per pixel colour depth
• CMYK, Lab, Greyscale and RGB colour modes
• Colour panel (RGB, HSL, LAB, CMYK, Greyscale)
• Swatches panel (Apple, System, Web Safe colours, Crayons)
• Swatches panel
• Colour Picker Tool (colour mode aware, pick from anywhere on screen)
• Global colours
• Colour tints
• Professional colour support
• PANTONE® colour support
• ICC colour profiling
• Import Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) colour palettes (including spot colours)
• Drag-and-drop colours from Chroma app (SoftPress)

Vector brushes with stretch and corner controls

• High quality brush galleries
• Change brush size, hardness, and opacity on the fly
• Import/export brushes, including ABR file import
• Custom brushes (including image-based brushes)
• Multi-controller support including pressure and velocity
• Controller-specific brush dynamics
• Customisable controller ramps
• Sort vector brushes by date in Brushes panel

Text and typography

• Artistic and frame text
• Character and Paragraph panels
• Text styles
• Text on a path
• Path text overflow control
• Flowing text
• Spellchecking
• Advanced typography including ligatures
• OpenType font features
• Comprehensive bullets and numbering
• Improved IME text editing for Japanese and Simplified Chinese languages (from v1.10)
• Added support for emojis (from v1.10)

User interface

• Persona task-orientated workspaces
• Customisable tabbed workspace
• High DPI (retina) support
• Multiple document views
• Windowed, Full Screen, and Separated modes
• Docked or floating panels
• Comprehensive keyboard shortcuts and modifiers
• Customisable keyboard shortcuts
• Customisable toolbars
• Saveable Studio panel presets

Design Aids

• Pixel, Retina, and Outline view modes with Split View support
• Constraints for intelligent object scaling/anchoring
• Rotate canvas
• Rotate document view (canvas) with mouse scroll wheel
• Incredible zoom range
• Intuitive panning
• Saveable zoom viewpoints
• Customisable margin colours
• Customisable bleed colours
• Powerful snapping control
• Snap to pixel selection bounds
• Dynamic snapping guides for precise alignment
• Fixed guides and column guides
• Rulers with spread origin control
• Multi-object alignment and distribution
• On-object alignment handles
• Pixel-accurate alignment for web graphics and website mockups
• Managers for Brushes, Grids, Snapping and other operations
• Automatic, fixed and projection grids (with colour/opacity control)
• Context toolbar and hintline
• Fluid document History <8192 steps with branching control
• Save history with document (multi-session)
• Snapshots
• Keyboard modifiers for on-the-fly tool changes
• Mixed-mode assistant eases vector and pixel mode switching according to the user’s preferences
• Defaults (document and global)
• Isometric grids
  • Isometric Panel for easy grid creation, as-you-draw transforms and plane switching
  • On-page draggable grid origin with grid axis scaling and angle adjustment
  • Presets for Grid and Axis Manager
  • Cube mode for custom grids from transformable cube
• Added 'Limit Initial Zoom to 100%' preferences option (from v1.10)

Pixel-based designs

• Seamlessly switch to and from pixel editing mode to apply finish to vector artwork
• Pixel brushes for high-quality textures
  • Import/export brushes, including ABR file import
  • Custom brushes
  • Create image brushes from any pixel selection
  • Create intensity brushes from any mask's pixel selection
  • Change brush size and colour on the fly
  • Sub-brushes (combined brushes)
  • Brush symmetry and mirroring
  • Choice of brush and nozzle controllers/ramps
  • Sort pixel brushes by date in Brushes panel
• Pixel selection tools
  • Shaped selections
  • Elliptical Marquee Tool draws from centre
  • Smart selection brush works over pixel and vector data
  • Refine selections to capture fine detail
  • Flood Select Tool selects pixels of a similar colour
• Pixel adjustment brushes
  • Dodge and Burn brushes
  • Smudge, Blur and Sharpen brushes
• Masks
• Pixel flood fill tool
• Pixel and vector artwork exported in harmony
  • Pixel artwork scaled if required on output
  • Nearest Neighbour, Bilinear, Bicubic and Lanczos 3 pixel scaling available
  • Set export areas and file formats during or after the design process

Interoperability:

• Retention of vector design elements when cutting and pasting between Affinity Designer and other applications
• Affinity Designer files can be opened in other Affinity products and vice versa
• iCloud sync and merge
• In-app registration
• Content sync of Affinity Store purchases

Document control, Import, Export and Printing

• Easy Document Setup with preset thumbnails and template support
• Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher file placement
• Scaling control for placed documents (PDFs, PSDs and Affinity documents)
• High-quality Adobe® Photoshop® PSD import, place and export
• Adobe Illustrator (.ai) import and place
• PDF import
• PDF passthrough for absolute display/output fidelity
• Place images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, SVG, EPS, EXR, HDR)
• Alt/Option-dragging files gives placement options via Place Images panel (v1.10)
• SVG import and export, including Inkscape extended SVG support
• SVG import/export improvements (from v1.10)
• Stock Panel for free and royalty-free image resources
• JPEG-XR 101010 import
• Export slices, layers, pages, and artboards to PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, EPS, SVG and PDF
• Preserve layers in exported TIFF images
• Export automatically to retina sizes (@2x and @3x)
• Set export areas and file formats during or after designing
• Export document or current selection(s) to many raster image formats, PSD, PDF, EPS and more
• Export Preview which updates to changed settings
• Desktop printing with Layout, Paper Handling, Feed, and Duplexing control
• Web-ready PDFs (Acrobat) with presets
• Professional hi-res PDF/X printing (CMYK) with presets
• Spot colours and overprint control
• Bleed (with preview) and printers marks