Features of Affinity Designer
Here's an overview of the features of Affinity Designer. Choose a category from the menu below, which includes options to view all features, or only those that are new in this version—marked with a red bullet (▪ ).
All features
New in v1.9/1.10
Power, performance and compatibility
Solid graphic design tools
Powerful layer management
External resource management
Professional object control
Professional color support
Vector brushes with stretch and corner control
Text and typography
User interface
Design aids
Pixel-based designs
Interoperability
Document control, Import, Export and Printing
Power, performance and compatibility:
Optimized 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 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
Artboards
Intuitive Move Tool moves, scales, transforms
Select multiple objects by type, color, stroke weight, transparency, and more
Rotate/transform from movable origin
Customizable 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 stabilizer 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
Customizable, 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 colors in Gradient Map adjustments
Clipping within layers
High quality layer effects
Layer effects work with global colors
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
Colored layer entry tagging for easy identification
External resource management
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
Customizable geometric shapes
Select multiple objects by type, color, 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 color support
16-bits per pixel color depth
CMYK, Lab, Grayscale and RGB color modes
Color panel (RGB, HSL, LAB, CMYK, Grayscale)
Swatches panel (Apple, System, Web Safe colors, Crayons)
Swatches panel (System, Web Safe colors, Crayons)
Color Picker Tool (color mode aware, pick from anywhere on screen)
Global colors
Color tints
Professional color support
PANTONE® color support
ICC color profiling
Import Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) color palettes (including spot colors)
Drag-and-drop colors 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
Customizable 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
Customizable tabbed workspace
High DPI (retina) support
Multiple document views
Windowed, Full Screen, and Separated modes
Docked or floating panels
Comprehensive keyboard shortcuts and modifiers
Customizable keyboard shortcuts
Customizable 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
Customizable margin colors
Customizable bleed colors
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 color/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 color 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 center
Smart selection brush works over pixel and vector data
Refine selections to capture fine detail
Flood Select Tool selects pixels of a similar color
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 Neighbor, 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 colors and overprint control
Bleed (with preview) and printers marks