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Software company Serif has released version 1.7 of its Affinity Photo editing application and the update brings a performance boost, HDR support and a range of new tools.
On Mac computers end-to-end Metal compute acceleration takes advantage of Apple’s discrete GPU, resulting in a 10x speed increase for all raster layer and brush operations. In addition the software now also supports multiple GPUs, both internal and external variants, allowing for even better performance.
Serif says hardware acceleration will soon be available for PC users as well but the Windows version already benefits from the app’s rewritten memory management system, which provides 3x or 4x speed improvements for many tasks on Windows computers. Dial and Pen support for Microsoft Surface devices has also been upgraded, offering new ways to interact with the apps.
Support for HDR / EDR displays is another important update in version 1.7, allowing photographers to see more detail in raw files.
There are also an improved iPad UI, a rewritten brush engine with new multi-brushes, a faster raw processing engine with better noise reduction, a new demosaicing algorithm and an updated batch processing system.
If you want to try the software yourself Affinity Photo can be downloaded for $ 39.99 for the desktop version and $ 15.99 for the iPad version. Existing users can install the update free of charge.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)