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Affinity Photo Customer Beta (1.9.0.204)


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Status: Beta

Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo

Mac App Store: Not submitted

Download ZIP (Universal): Download

Auto-update: Available

 

Hello,

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the fifth build of Affinity Photo 1.9.0 for macOS.

If this is your first time using a customer beta of an Affinity app, it’s worth noting that the beta will install as a separate app - alongside your store version. They will not interfere with each other at all and you can continue to use the store version for critical work without worry.

This beta is significantly different from the 1.8 version available for purchase - we strongly recommend that you do not use this beta for real work as data could be lost and the files you save are not guaranteed to open in previous / future versions of Affinity Photo.

Furthermore, massive behind the scenes work has been done to enable GPU acceleration for the Windows version of Affinity Photo in 1.9. In theory this should have no consequences for macOS / iOS users - but it’s likely that a couple of things will have become broken along the way. We are giving ourselves a longer beta period with 1.9 in order to find and fix those things.

This also means that the full complement of new features is not available yet in this 1.9 beta - more will be added over the coming weeks.

Thanks again for your continued support!

 

Affinity Photo Team  :ph34r:

 

Changes Since 1.9.0.203

 

- Compatibility with recently released 1.8.6 retail build.
- Pattern improvements - brushes now wrap around the edges of the pattern.
- Timelapse improvements - progress bar, abortable, crossfade.
- Improved colours for Canon EOS R5 camera RAW.
- Filter effects now work properly with global colours.

- Fixed repeat issue with pattern nodes.
- Fixed timelapse memory leak.
- Fixed timelapse zoom to area bugs.
- Fixed issues with pattern nodes when they contain child nodes.
- Fixed white balance issues.
- Assorted other small bug fixes.

 

Cumulative Changes Since 1.8

 

- Added a new “Astrophotography Stack” persona which allows you to combine dark frames, light frames, bias frames, flat frames and dark flat frames then stack them. FITS images are also supported. Lots of photographers have been experimenting with astro during lockdown - hopefully these new tools will help users to get better results. I'm sure James Ritson will be providing some tutorial guidance in short order :)

- Added “Pattern Layers” - a fixed size bitmap layer which repeats across the entire document. You can paint on pattern layers and use all filters to manipulate them and see the resulting pattern in real time. They can be transformed non-destructively. After a pattern is added and a tool selected, a faint grey box indicates the "real" area of the pattern which can be edited.

- Added “Export Timelapse” - the ability to export a document which has undo steps as a video. Numerous options exist to control how the video is generated (and more will come later!).

- Added “Live Liquify” layers - as the name suggests, they allow you to have non-destructive liquify layers in your stack which can be edited and masked just like all other live filter layers. At the moment, a hard limit of 512 pixels offset in either X or Y is enforced - we hope to eventually lift this restriction.

- Reworked “Studio Presets” from the earlier 1.9 betas. They now work in a more predictable way and store tool / toolbar configuration. A manager dialog is also now provided.

- Added a new “Combined” result to the benchmark - to test performance contexts where vector and raster content is used together. The benchmark version is still 1900 - so existing vector and raster scores from previous builds are still valid and comparable.

- Added a registration page to the app - this allows users to login and auto-install brushes (so far).

- Added the “Resource Manager” functionality from Publisher for managing image placement.

- Added ability to open package files from Designer and Publisher.

- Photo is now a universal binary, supporting both Intel and Apple silicon processors.

- Path text improvements.

- Assorted small bug fixes.
- Help improvements.
- Localisation improvements.


- Added “Duplicate spare channel” to right click menu.
- Added missing “Convert to Path Text” menu item.
- Small improvements to the benchmark UI.
- Update app icon for Big Sur.
- Fixed numerous bugs with brushes, introduced in the 1.9.0 betas.
- Fixed issues when opening multiple RAW files at once.
- Fixed significant memory leak introduced in 1.9.0 betas.
- Fixed UI issues with Big Sur.
- Fixed assorted other GPU acceleration issues introduced in the 1.9.0 betas.

 

- Text on a path is now available in Photo.
- More filters now work on masks / adjustments / spare channels (Add Noise, Perlin Noise, etc.).
- Improved Metal rendering performance (over 195).
- Improved experience when editing a spare channel (view artefacts, histogram and navigator).
- Setting a blend mode on a sub-brush will now work properly - paving the way for import of PSD dual-brushes in a future build.
- Attempted to fix startup crash on machines with no compatible Metal GPU.
- Fixed localisation issues affecting non-UK users.
- Fixed issues when attempting to add layers to a spare channel (!).


- Improved “Serif Labs” RAW engine.
- You can now single click a spare channel in the Channels panel to edit it like a layer.
- The Curves adjustment now has numeric field controls for precise positioning.
- Studio presets are now available.
- A benchmarking tool has been added in the help menu. It will only become available when no documents are open.
- Blend modes now work on “alpha only” layers (masks, adjustments, live filters, etc.).
- Added a new “Divide” blend mode.
- Added “Create from centre” for the elliptical marquee tool.
- Allowed snapping to the bounds of the pixel selection.
- Added ability to create brushes from the current pixel selection with one click.

 

To be notified about all future macOS beta updates, please follow this notification thread 
To be notified when this Photo update comes out of beta and is fully released to all Affinity Photo on macOS customers, please follow this thread

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Does Photo support Apple‘s newly introduced (as of iOS 14.3 Beta) iPhone 12 Pro RAW photo format?

2021 16” Macbook Pro w/ M1 Max 10c cpu /24c gpu, 32 GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Ventura 13.6

2018 11" iPad Pro w/ A12X cpu/gpu, 256 GB, iPadOS 17

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On 11/14/2020 at 3:17 AM, Andy Somerfield said:

- Fixed repeat issue with pattern nodes.
- Fixed issues with pattern nodes when they contain child nodes.

Maybe I'm just being stupid but I do not understand what "pattern nodes" are or how they can have child nodes. I associate nodes with vector objects but I have not found any way to include anything other than a single bitmap pattern in any pattern layer.

Can someone explain more about how pattern layers can be used or tell me where I can find more info about this?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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8 hours ago, Andy Somerfield said:

- Fixed issues with pattern layers when they contain child layers.

.. would be more correct.

Briefly, how should child layers of pattern layers work? I added an ellipse to a simple 'one dot' bitmap pattern layer, expecting it to appear in every instance of the pattern, but it appears only once.

1421153555_patternwithchild.jpg.fa1f242cd79c2e8594be6b6a409c4411.jpg

pattern +child.afphoto

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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17 hours ago, Andy Somerfield said:

R-C-R,

Apologies, I am confusing the issue by using our internal terminology in the release notes (layers are "nodes" in our parlance).

- Fixed repeat issue with pattern layers.
- Fixed issues with pattern layers when they contain child layers.

.. would be more correct.

A


Do you have plans to implement this Full Nodeization at some point in the future?

The more restricted you put on the program, the closer you program is to idiot.

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17 hours ago, R C-R said:

Briefly, how should child layers of pattern layers work?

I believe they are referring to having fixed this:

 

The pattern layers are for raster patterns, and the layer you show as a child is a vector object.  It would be nice to see it repeated as well, but sadly I don't believe that is what they had in mind.

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9 hours ago, Aftemplate said:

Do you have plans to implement this Full Nodeization at some point in the future?

The devs mentioned somewhere on the forum that the Affinity products use something like a node-based architecture internally as part of their engine.  Obviously it is presented to the user using layers instead.

This is not a change, it has been that way for some time now (presumably from day 1) so I wouldn't read into it.  If they are already node-based internally but are using the more limited presentation of layers at the user level then this was obviously an intentional design choice they made and I wouldn't expect it to change quickly.

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Aftemplate,

I have nearly implemented the "node mode" feature a few times now - never actually got round to doing it - I imagine it will happen at some point (although not for 1.9!).

It would be interesting to hear what people would expect from a feature like that..

Thanks,

A

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57 minutes ago, Andy Somerfield said:

Repeating child vector objects could become a thing if people think it's useful? I nearly put a toggle in for it yesterday then had second thoughts (exporting these to a vector target will rasterise them, of course).

Yes, that would be useful. I think being able to nest any type of object would be useful for non-destructive creation. Please do it :D

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1 hour ago, Andy Somerfield said:

It would be interesting to hear what people would expect from a feature like that..

For one thing, the ability to connect a single node in multiple places - for example, using one mask node as the mask for multiple other nodes, so that updating the mask in one place gets applied in several places.

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1 hour ago, Andy Somerfield said:

Repeating child vector objects could become a thing if people think it's useful?

 

Definitely.  Particularly if they then also export as vector.

 

Probably not worth trying to rush into this beta so much, but as a future enhancement, it might also be interesting to be able to either horizontally or vertically offset each row/column of the pattern:

image.png.604405c1383cb35ccb2185ac0e6b4766.png 

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4 minutes ago, fde101 said:

 

 

Definitely.  Particularly if they then also export as vector.

 

Probably not worth trying to rush into this beta so much, but as a future enhancement, it might also be interesting to be able to either horizontally or vertically offset each row/column of the pattern:

image.png.604405c1383cb35ccb2185ac0e6b4766.png 

 

Considering both patterns and a nodal interface, we could have a pattern generator node that takes an input and repeats it spatially according to parameters.

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3 hours ago, Andy Somerfield said:

Repeating child vector objects could become a thing if people think it's useful? I nearly put a toggle in for it yesterday then had second thoughts (exporting these to a vector target will rasterise them, of course).

I would very much prefer to being able to use any kind of vector objects for pattern creation in addition to pixels. Actually this works already pretty well with the Data Merge Layout Tool in APub (in case you didn't notice this 😉 ).

d.

Affinity Designer 1 & 2   |   Affinity Photo 1 & 2   |   Affinity Publisher 1 & 2
Affinity Designer 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Photo 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Publisher 2 for iPad

Windows 11 64-bit - Core i7 - 16GB - Intel HD Graphics 4600 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
iPad pro 9.7" + Apple Pencil

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6 hours ago, Andy Somerfield said:

Repeating child vector objects could become a thing if people think it's useful?

I also think it would be very useful. Basically, I would like to see pattern layers treated as another type of container layers, capable of including any type of child layer, bitmap and/or vector, plus adjustments, filters, etc.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Yay for the pattern layer!!! 

+1 on child vector objects on repeat being very useful.

I would like to suggest being able to add pattern layers’ properties to the Styles panel to easily apply them to other objects.

Thanks to @dominik for mentioning the Data Merge Layout tool for vector pattern creation, can’t wait to try this workaround!

 

Wishlist: calligraphic vector brush, blend/replicate tool, vector pattern feature

 

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7 hours ago, PhlixFer said:

Live liquify is there to fill the void that is the lack of vector warping.

For some use cases, but note that the output of this is always going to be raster.  As an example, people trying to use warping to create shapes for paper craft cutters or laser cutting and the like will not benefit from this (at least not for that purpose).

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