Settings (or Preferences)

• Choose whether to restore the last session when launching app.
• Choose whether documents open in a floating window separate from the app's main window.
• Choose whether documents open in the current active group, meaning the most recent floating window, or in the app's main window.
• Choose whether to limit initial zoom to a maximum of 100% when loading files.
• Choose whether to automatically link newly created or imported content categories to all Affinity 2 apps on your device.
• Send anonymous usage information collects Analytics data related to your computer OS, hardware and app usage for continual product improvement. This data is used for statistical analysis. Absolutely no personal information, as covered by data protection rules, is contained in the data collected.
• (On Windows) choose whether to prefer metafile to raster when pasting from external app.
• Choose to open PSDs with editable text objects.
• Choose to treat Smart Objects in PSD documents as embedded documents.
• Configure whether depth maps from HEIC iPhone Portrait images have additional resampling applied upon import.
• Select whether to show or hide file extensions.
• Choose whether to create SVGs when copying objects for better cross-platform interaction.
• You can exclude your thumbnail from being stored with your document.
• Choose whether to overwrite imported PSD files when using the Save command, rather than creating an *.afdesign file. We recommend reading the warning provided in the dialog before selecting this option.
• Choose whether to insert filler text as editable text.
• Choose whether metadata stored in a sidecar XMP file is imported when opening its corresponding image.
• For automatic RAW lens correction, include lens profile updates for new cameras. Place the downloaded Lensfun XML file or Adobe Lens Correction Profile (LCP) in the opened folder.
• Language—Sets the UI language independently of the operating system. Select from the pop-up menu.
• You can open your app's fonts folder, from which Affinity Font (.affont) files (previously installed by dragging onto the app) can be removed to uninstall them. (Affinity Fonts installed via the Account feature can be uninstalled using that feature.)

• You can set up your default RGB, CMYK, Greyscale and LAB colour profiles for use in future documents. Select from the pop-up menus.
• Rendering Intent—Choose the rendering intent for your images. Select from the pop-up menu.
• Choose whether to apply black point compensation when opening an image.
• Choose whether to convert an opened file's colour space to the working space and also choose whether to warn that this has occurred.
• Choose whether to receive a warning when a working profile is assigned to an unprofiled image.
• Configure OpenColorIO by choosing a configuration file and working directory. See Using OpenColorIO for more information.
• Configure additional OpenEXR document import options. See 32-bit OpenEXR support for more information.
• Choose whether to merge EXR alpha channel information to its associated RGB pixel layer's alpha channel.
• Choose whether to divide EXR colour channels by the alpha channel.
• Choose whether to leave zero alpha information untouched, or, with Post divide EXR colours by alpha enabled as well, for zero alpha information to be altered so post-division with colour channel information can be achieved.

• RAM Usage Limit—allows you to set your preference for optimizing app performance for your projects.
• Disk Usage Warning At—choose the limit at which you are warned about disk usage.
• Undo Limit—choose the history length you are able to access.
• View Quality—choose the way in which the image displays during modifications. Select from the pop-up menu.
• Choose whether to dither gradients, when working on projects, to speed up performance.
• Choose a clipping option for optimizing performance.
• File Recovery Interval—sets the interval for saving temporary data for currently open documents, allowing a document restore to be offered at startup if the app develops a fault.
• Display—Choose whether to use hardware acceleration such as Metal, OpenGL or OpenGL (Basic), or use Software acceleration. If your computer experiences performance problems, use the above option order until performance is acceptable. If your Mac has an additional discrete graphics card, checking the Use only integrated GPU will not allow access to it, therefore reducing power consumption and conserving battery life (useful for unplugged MacBook Pros).
• Renderer—choose your rendering experience. Select from the pop-up menu.
  • Default—renders using the default method—typically the installed graphics card.
  • Graphics display adapter—the name here varies depending on your graphics card and its driver. If you have multiple graphics cards installed you may see more than one option here.
  • WARP—use Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform just for presenting the document. Try this if you are experiencing performance issues with the default option.
• Retina Rendering—choose your rendering experience. Select from the pop-up menu.
  • Automatic (Best)—renders as non-retina followed by retina for balanced performance and quality.
  • Low quality (Fastest)—renders as non-retina only for highest performance level but compromises on quality.
  • High quality (Slowest)—renders as retina only for high quality but may compromise performance.
• Hardware Acceleration—checking Enable Metal compute acceleration boosts some tasks' performance if a compatible GPU is available. See the Hardware acceleration topic.
• Hardware Acceleration—checking Enable OpenCL compute acceleration boosts some tasks' performance if a compatible GPU is available. See the Hardware acceleration topic.

• Background Grey Level—controls the greyscale level of the page background.
• Artboard Background Grey Level—controls the greyscale level of the pasteboard surrounding artboards (from Affinity Designer documents).
• Text Contrast—adjusts the luminance of text in the user interface.
• UI Brightness—adjusts the luminance of window backgrounds in the user interface.
• UI Contrast—instantly sets Text Contrast and UI Brightness for high contrast between text and window backgrounds, or to their default values.
• UI Font Size—optionally increase the font size of UI text.
• UI Style—displays the user interface in a dark or light style.
• Tooltip Delay—set the length of time before a tooltip appears when hovering over a UI element.
• Decimal Places for Unit Types—controls the number of decimal places allowable for each document measurement unit and degree readouts.
• Locks (or keeps unlocked) an imported image as a background layer.
• Choose whether line width (thickness) displays in points or in the document's measurement units.
• Choose whether text is expressed in points or in the document's measurement units.
• The Show Brush Previews option (when enabled) displays a circular preview of the current brush's nozzle; disable the option to hide the nozzle preview if the preview obscures existing page content. When Force pressure on the brush tool's context toolbar is enabled, previews are automatically disabled.
• Overlays a crosshair over the brush cursor for better targeting.
• Makes icons display in greyscale (monochromatic iconography).
• Expands layer to reveal selected object entry when object is selected on the page.
• Choose whether to commit filters if subsequently carrying out a new operation while the Apply dialog is still open or whether to receive a prompt to Apply or Discard the filter instead. Clicking Apply will always commit the filter, irrespective of the this setting.
• Choose whether to activate Touch Bar support.
• Choose whether to enable pointer support.
• Choose whether you would like to be prompted to name a layer or group upon creation.

• Tool Handle Size—makes selected layer content's bounding box handles and curve nodes (and handles) smaller or larger.
• Choose whether +click displays context menus (alternative to right-click with a multi-button mouse).
• Enable or disable the Force Touch context menu; when enabled, the menu is accessed by a strong-press on a Force Touch-compatible trackpad.
• Choose whether an object is added to a selection when partially covered by the selection marquee or whether it has to be encompassed by the marquee.
• When enabled, cycling between tools is only possible with modifier pressed.
• Choose whether the middle mouse button will allow scrolling or zooming.
• Choose whether dragging with the Zoom Tool zooms around the cursor (scrubby zoom) or creates a 'zoom to' marquee.
• Enable Dial support—Check the option to use Surface Studio's Surface Dial (or equivalent radial device).
• Synchronise tools between documents—Makes tool settings persistent between different documents.
• Choose if the canvas can be rotated using a Trackpad or not.
• Choose if the canvas can be rotated using a scroll wheel or not.
• Touch for gestures only—When enabled, only your connected tablet pen can use tools on the canvas but you can still use gestures. Useful for preventing accidental tool use when interacting with the canvas. When disabled, you have full touch control plus gestures, with or without a tablet pen.
• Move Tool Aspect Constrain—controls the default constraining behaviour when resizing objects using the Move Tool. Select from the pop-up menu.
• Create Text with Blend Gamma—controls the default blend gamma applied to text on creation.
• Nudge Distance—sets the amount by which an object is moved when using the arrow keys. Select measurement units from the pop-up menu.
• Modifier Nudge Distance—sets the nudge amount by which an object is moved when using the arrow keys along with the .
• Synchronise tools between documents—Makes tool settings persistent between different documents.
• Additional dictionary folder—add an additional folder that you can copy dictionary files into. The directory is scanned during start-up and found dictionaries will be added.

• Use these options to define your own keyboard shortcuts. See the Customising keyboard shortcuts topic.

When you perform certain operations—for example, pixel painting (or erasing) on vector layers, or applying adjustments to selections—the Assistant will take action according to your preferences and display an alert message to make you aware.

Use these options to control overall Assistant behaviour:

• Enable assistant—when checked, the Assistant will perform your chosen action for any operation it can help with. When unchecked, the Assistant does not perform any actions.
• One-step undo/redo of complex assistant actions—when checked, any action that has been recorded as multiple consecutive history states is treated like one state by the Undo and Redo commands. When unchecked, the commands need to be selected multiple times to undo/redo multi-state assistant actions.
• Alert when assistant takes an action—when checked, the Assistant will display an alert message whenever it takes action. When unchecked, alert messages are not displayed.

Use these options to specify the required action for various operations and tool behaviours:

• Painting with no layer selected—Creates a new pixel layer for your brush strokes using 'Add new pixel layer and paint' if there is no pixel or vector layer selected; 'Take no action' means that no pixel painting is allowed.
• Erasing from vector layers—Erases on a created pixel mask applied to your vector layer. You can change this behaviour to immediately rasterise the vector layer and erase directly on it, or to take no action.
• Other brushes on vector layers—For retouching pixel brushes (e.g., Burn Brush Tool, Smudge Brush Tool, etc.), any applied brush stroke rasterises the vector layer by default. You can change this behaviour by selecting 'Take no Action', which doesn't convert the layer or apply the stroke.
• Brush tool sharing—Choose whether a selected brush and context toolbar settings are shared between tools of a similar nature (e.g. Dodge, Burn and Sponge Brush Tools), shared across all tools, or each tool's brush is set independently.
• Applying filters to vector layers—For effect and retouch filters from the Filters menu, applying a filter to a vector layer rasterises the layer by default. You can change this behaviour by selecting 'Take no action', which doesn't convert the layer or apply the filter.
• Adding adjustment layer to selection—If you've created a selection, any adjustment applied to it is added as a new adjustment layer above the currently selected layer or made a child adjustment layer of the selected layer instead. With no layer selected, the new adjustment layer is added to the top of the layer stack.
• Adding mask layer to selection—Analogous to 'Adding adjustment layer to selection' above, but for mask layers.
• Adding filter layer to selection—Analogous to 'Adding adjustment layer to selection' above, but for filter layers.
• Develop Assistant—Click to configure options that control how RAW files are developed in Develop Persona:
  • Enable assistant—When checked, the Develop Assistant will behave according to your choices for its other options. When unchecked, the Assistant leaves the development of RAW files entirely to you.
  • RAW Engine—Provides a choice of RAW processing engines for you to use—Affinity's own Serif Labs engine (used by default) or Apple's Core Image RAW engine.
  • Default lens profile—Enable or disable automatic lens correction for supported camera lens profiles. Lens profiles are installed with the app. If a camera is not included (perhaps a new model), you can include it by adding its profile—a downloaded Lensfun XML file or Adobe Lens Correction Profile (LCP)—to the database by using General options.
  • Noise reduction—Automatically enables either colour noise reduction, colour and luminance noise reduction, or disables any initial noise reduction. Colour noise reduction is recommended for the vast majority of camera raw images.
  • RAW output format—Choose between RGB (16 bit) or RGB (32 bit HDR) output when developing a raw image. Choosing RGB (32 bit HDR) allows you to maintain a full 32-bit float environment from initial raw development to export and take advantage of extra precision.
  • Tone curve—If the default 'Apply tone curve' option is selected, your raw image is adjusted using a suggested tone curve. The 'Take no action' option makes no tonal correction; the image can be altered within the Basic panel later.
  • Alert when assistant takes an action—When checked, a pop-up message appears on loading the RAW image to indicate that adjustments have been applied automatically.
  • Exposure bias—Choose whether to apply exposure bias value if stored in the raw image's EXIF data. Like Histogram stretch, both 'default' and 'initial' give the same results but reports zeroed or actual values, respectively. The 'Take no action' option ignores the exposure bias value.
  • Map default region—Sets the map that displays in the Location panel to a chosen region, if the raw image contains no GPS location data in its EXIF data.

• Open Default Folder in Finder—Gain direct access to the default folder which is searched for plugins. Plugins can be added to this folder for easy access from the Filters menu.
• Open Default Folder in Explorer—Gain direct access to the default folder which is searched for plugins. Plugins can be added to this folder for easy access from the Filters menu.
• Add/Remove Plugin Search Folder—adds or removes a folder in which to search or access support files to make plugins accessible from the Filters menu.
• Add/Remove Plugin Support Folder—adds or removes folders that contain supporting files for plugins (for example directories containing executables or presets).
• Authorise Global—authorises access to supporting plugin files across multiple users and further resolves compatibility issues.

• Use these options if you use multiple personal devices to edit documents that contain linked resources from cloud storage. See the Linked Services topic.

• Sets the frequency to which the app will check for any software updates. You can switch off update checking by selecting 'Never'.