Features of Affinity Designer

New in V2.5

• Stroke Width Tool for freehand pencil and pen drawing:
  • Edit pressure profiles on the page
  • Works in unison with Pressure chart
  • Intelligent locking of line widths and pressure points
  • Optional snapping control
• Pencil tool improvements:
  • Smoother drawing results
  • No node clean up or reshaping needed
  • A sharp corner node is added when the stroke changes direction sharply
  • Auto Close offers proximity-based visual indication of closure
• Native Windows ARM64 support
• QR Code Tool
• Variable fonts
• Typography panel
• Visual indication of rescaled text frame
• Set grid preset as default
• DWG polylines import improvements
• Transform by absolute sizes using Transform Objects Separately
• Character/Paragraph panels offer easier updating of modified text style

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
  • Hardware GPU acceleration (OpenCL) for integrated, discrete and external GPUs
• Display support
  • Regular, Retina and expanded gamut DCI-P3
  • Wide colour gamut (Display P3)
  • HiDPI
  • EDR
  • HDR (Windows; >400 nits recommended)
• Mac with Apple M1/M2/M3 chip or Intel processor
• macOS Catalina 10.15 or later
• Create massive gigapixel-sized documents
• 16-bits per channel editing
• Sub-pixel accuracy
• 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)
• DirectX 10 compatible
• Windows® 11, Windows® 10 May 2020 Update (2004, 20H1, build 19041) or later

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
• 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
• 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
• Clipping within layers
• High quality layer effects
• Pixel adjustments and effects on vectors
• Blend modes
• 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
• Embedded/linked resource policy on new document creation
• Resource Manager
• 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 for pre-supplied and custom colour palettes
• 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

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

User interface

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

Design Aids

• Pixel, Retina, and Wireframe (Outline and X-ray) view modes with Split View support
• Constraints for intelligent object scaling/anchoring
• Rotate document view
• Incredible zoom range
• Intuitive panning
• Saveable zoom viewpoints
• 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
• 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/advanced axonometric 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
  • Grid presets
  • Cube mode for custom grids from transformable cube

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 brushes from any pixel selection on pixel or mask layer
  • Change brush size and colour on the fly
  • Sub-brushes (combined brushes)
  • Brush symmetry and mirroring
  • Choice of brush and nozzle controllers/ramps
• Pixel selection tools
  • Shaped selections
  • Smart selection brush works over pixel and vector data
  • Freehand Selection Tool with Polygonal and Magnetic modes
  • Refine selections to capture fine detail
  • Flood selection
• 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 apps
• Affinity Designer files can be opened in other Affinity products and vice versa
• In-app licence activation
• 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
• 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)
• SVG import and export, including Inkscape extended SVG support
• Stock Panel for free and royalty-free image resources
• 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
• 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