Features

Power, performance and compatibility:

• Optimized for:
  • Grand Central Dispatch (GCD)
  • OpenGL
  • Metal view acceleration (macOS Sierra and above; optimized for Mojave)
  • Mac with Apple M1 chip or Intel processor
  • OS X Mavericks 10.9 or later (Supported up to macOS Big Sur 11.0)
  • Core Graphics
  • Direct3D
  • Metal compute acceleration for integrated, discrete and external GPUs (eGPU enclosures supported)
  • GPU compute hardware acceleration (macOS 10.13 High Sierra or later)
  • 64-bit engine
• Create massive gigapixel-sized documents
• 16-bits per channel editing
• Sub-pixel accuracy
• For all Intel 64-bit Macs (Core 2 Duo onwards)
• For OS X 10.7 (and above) and up to macOS Mojave 10.14.0 (and above)
• 64-bit plug-in support
• Improved Photoshop plugin support (includes DxO Nik Collection 2 plugins)
• Embedded Photoshop PSD Smart Objects retain editability
• Up to date Tablet support
• Multi-touch support
• Surface Studio with Surface Pen and Surface Dial support
• Force Touch support (Magic Trackpad 2/MacBook/MacBookPro)
• Touch Bar support (MacBook Pro)
• End-to-end EXIF preservation

Raw development:

• Choice of SerifLabs or Apple Core Image RAW engines
• SerifLabs Raw Engine
• GPU-accelerated raw development
• Remove automatic tone curve and apply your own
• Automatic lens correction and noise reduction
• Develop assistant for setting default tone, lens correction, noise reduction, and exposure control behavior
• Dedicated tones, lens, noise reduction and sharpening panels
• Support for the latest cameras
• Split view with syncing
• Solid and gradient overlays for restricting adjustments
• Show clipped highlights, shadows, and tones (in output color space)
• Hot pixel removal (SerifLabs RAW Engine only)
• Manual lens correction override in Develop Persona with advisory icons and messages, plus recently used and favorites lists
• Updated Supported Raw Camera list
• Canon CR3 RAW support (via SerifLabs Raw engine)

Professional color support:

• CMYK, Lab, Grayscale and RGB color modes
• Color panel (RGB, HSL, LAB, CMYK, Grayscale)
• Swatches panel (Apple, System, Web Safe colors, Crayons)
• Swatches panel
• Generate palette from image
• Global colors
• Color tints
• Color Picker Tool (color mode aware, pick from anywhere on screen, color averaging, layer selection)
• Color Replacement Brush
• Paint Mixer Brush
• Gradient tool (Linear, Elliptical, Radial, Conical, Bitmap)
• Professional color support
• Spot colors and overprint
• PANTONE® color support
• ICC color profiling
• Rendering Intent and Black Point Compensation controls when converting document (global default and document override)
• Import Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) color palettes (including spot colors)
• Drag-and-drop colors from Chroma app (SoftPress)
• Updated PANTONE© Color Bridge and PANTONE© Formula Guide Solid palettes (coated and uncoated); all to V4

Solid photo-editing power:

• Sizing and transforming:
  • Resize images and canvas
  • Crop to original/custom ratios, absolute dimensions or print sizes
  • Straighten photos
  • Mesh Warp Tool
  • Non-destructive perspective filter
  • Liquify tools in dedicated Persona workspace
  • Pixel art resizing
• HDR/32-bit
  • Merge bracketed exposures together to create 32-bit images
  • Unique Persona for Advanced Tone Mapping
  • Edit effortlessly in 32-bit unbounded color format
  • Maintain a true 32-bit lossless workflow and preview full tonal range
  • Multichannel OpenEXR and Radiance import and export
  • Full OpenColorIO Integration
  • Color managed workflow: choose between display transform, linear light and OpenColorIO transforms
  • HDR and EDR display support (for 32-bit unbounded HDR documents)
• Panorama Persona for powerful auto-stitched panoramas
• Live projections (equirectangular and perspective)
• Stacking
  • For noise reduction
  • For exposure merging
  • For moving object removal
  • Auto-alignment
  • Non-destructive behavior
• Focus merging with source cloning
• Selection tools:
  • Shaped selections
  • Intelligent Selection Brush Tool
  • Better selection edge fidelity with Soft Edges
  • Freehand Selection Tool with Polygonal and Magnetic modes
  • Refine selections to capture fine detail
  • Store and save selections
  • Quick masks
• Comprehensive metadata editing with IPTC Core 1.2 support and import/export XMP; read metadata from XMP sidecar file

Powerful layer management:

• Drag-and-drop layers
• Drag and drop layers from one document to another
• Non-destructive adjustment layers with clipping previews
• Non-destructive Live Filter layers with 'live' before/after split views
• Apply adjustments, filters and blend modes at the stack, layer, group, selection or object level
• Clipping within layers
• Blend modes
• Blend ranges (linear and non-linear) and blend gamma control
• Lock child layer positions
• High-quality layer effects
• Layer masks (brush-based and gradient)
• Improved mask editing (uses grayscale mask)
• Colored layer entry tagging for easy identification
• Image control:
  • Place images on dedicated layers
  • Resampling: Nearest Neighbor, Bilinear, Bicubic and Lanczos 3 pixel scaling

Brushes:

• Painting:
  • New pixel brush sets
  • High-quality brush galleries
  • Change brush size, hardness, and opacity on the fly
  • Undo Brush with 'paintback' to saved snapshot
  • Import/export brushes, including ABR file import
  • Custom brushes (including image-based brushes)
  • Assign tools to brushes selectively
  • Optimized for graphics tablets
  • Multi-controller support including pressure and velocity
  • Controller-specific brush dynamics
  • Customizable controller ramps
  • Wet Edges support with customizable ramps
  • Sub-brushes (combined brushes)
  • Brush symmetry and mirroring
  • Choice of brush and nozzle controllers/ramps
  • Stroke stabilization for smooth strokes
  • Nozzle rotation using left and right arrow keys
  • On-page brush preview's width/hardness controls now includes nozzle Spacing and Rotation adjustment
• Retouching:
  • Retouching tools:
    • Red-eye removal
    • Inpainting for object removal
    • Clone Brush/Healing Brush
    • Blemish Removal/Patching
  • Retouching brushes:
    • Dodge, Burn and Sponge brushes
    • Blur, Sharpen, Median and Smudge brushes

Macros and batch processing:

• Record and save actions as macros
• Edit individual recorded steps and their parameters
• Customize macro settings post recording
• Import, export, and maintain a macro library
• Run batch jobs for bulk processing and conversion of images
• Apply macros in batch jobs for a seamless custom workflow

Supporting vector design tools and concepts:

• Precise Pen tool
• Intuitive Move tool (moves, scales and transforms)
• Rotate from movable origin
• Customizable nudge distances
• Node tool for fine tuning vectors
• Customizable geometric shapes
• Full range of non-destructive Boolean geometry operations
• Duplicate and transform objects with precision
• Add noise to fills and strokes as a solid or graduated attribute
• Customizable stroke styles
• Styles presets with import/export
• Artistic and frame text
• Character and Paragraph panels
• Advanced typography including ligatures
  • Flowing text
  • Spellchecking
  • OpenType font features
• Convert shapes and text to fully editable curves
• Save and synchronize defaults
• Expressions

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
• Unified Application Toolbar (MacOS Mojave and above)

Design Aids:

• Rotate canvas
• Incredible zoom range
• Intuitive panning
• Saveable zoom viewpoints
• Dynamic snapping guides
• 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 for layer creation behavior according to the user’s preferences

Interoperability:

• Affinity Photo files can be opened in other Affinity products and vice versa
• iCloud sync and merge

Import, Export and Printing

• New Document Setup now has thumbnail-driven presets and supports templates
• High-quality Adobe® Photoshop® PSD import and export
• SVG import and export, including Inkscape extended SVG support
• Export layers, groups and pages to PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF, EPS, SVG and PDF
• Preserve layers in exported TIFF images
• Draw custom-sized slices at export time
• Use slice presets for popular image formats
• Multiple export setups, formats and resolutions per slice
• Output all slices at once, just one slice, or selected slices
• Export automatically to retina (@2x, @3x)
• Export automatically to high DPI
• Set export areas and file formats during or after photo editing
• Deliver UI design assets (iOS)
• 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 and printer marks
• JBIG2-encoded PDF import