Affinity Photo Customer Beta (1.9.2.236 - GM Seed)

[Andy Somerfield]

Status: GM Seed

Purpose: Features, improvements and fixes.

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo

Mac App Store: Submitted

Download ZIP: Download

Auto-update: Available

 

Hello,

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the final build of Affinity Photo 1.9.2 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 an incremental update to the 1.9.1 version recently released to all customers (although it still installs parallel to the released version, as described above). We recommend that you use this beta in preference to the store version if you are affected by any of the issues listed below.

Affinity Photo Team  

 

Changes Since 1.9.2.229

 

- The recent Metal changes have a couple of undesirable side effects. We have disabled them for the shipping version of 1.9.2. They will get cleaned up and reintroduced in the next beta cycle. This means the benchmark version remains at 1900 for 1.9.2.
- Fix potential crashes on M1 devices (introduced earlier in the 1.9.2 beta).
- Enforce ISO country code character limit.
- Fixed crashes with malformed ICC profiles.
- Improved the reliability of panorama stitching.
- Fixed bugs which were preventing Unsplash stock page items from working.
- Improved PSD import from recent versions of PS.
- Output levels (in the levels adjustment layer) are now correctly exported to / imported from PSD.
- Fixed missing EXIF data for EOS 300D RAW.
- Fixed a HEIC crash.
- Assorted tweaks to the new LUT import / export features.
- Assorted small fixes.
- Localisation improvements.
- Help improvements.

 

Changes Since 1.9.1

- Added ability to organise LUT adjustment presets, including support for multiple categories and import / export as “.afluts” files.
- Added ability to drag / drop all adjustment presets to reorder them.
- Added support for OpenType reverse chaining contextual single substitutions.
- Significant performance improvements for assets (import, export, organisation, etc.).
- Typography panel performance improvements.
- Minor improvements to Gaussian Blur performance when GPU is enabled.
- Assorted visual fixes in the adjustments panel.
- Further fixes for deadlocks with multiple GPUs.
- Restored ability to plug an eGPU in while the app is running.

- Fixed issues introduced in build 227 for users with multiple GPUs.
- Fixed occasional screen corruption introduced in build 227.
- Fixed potential deadlock issue when loading large files.
- Fixed assorted small registration page issues.
- Fixed the size of the “General” section in preferences.
- Fixed localisation issues in preferences.
- Fixed inability to add / rename / delete export presets.
- Fixed issue where UI would remain hidden when a studio page was enabled from the menu.

- Hardware acceleration has been improved to better make use of Metal (specifically to batch commands together into chunks, which gives the driver a better chance to optimise commands and provides a higher degree of abortability). The benchmark has also been tweaked to use multiple command queues for the Single GPU test, which makes it more representative of “real world” use.

This change affects both real-world performance and benchmark score. The benchmark version has been changed to 1920 - this means that results from this build should not be compared to results from previous builds with benchmark version 1900 (other than to measure the improvements which these changes yield). Once the iPad and Windows builds have been validated with these changes and new beta builds produced, a new forum thread will be created for 1920 benchmark results.

- Assorted performance improvements for assets.
- Assorted content download improvements and fixes.
- Added ability to optionally sort brushes by name.
- Improved performance of export and merge visible, especially in documents with Live Filters.

- Fixed a crash when using File -> Share after File -> Export.
- Fixed a bug where some Live Filters would appear to move after save / load.
- Fixed a crash when opening a brush category context menu with no selection.
- Fixed a bug which caused adjustment to fail to apply easily when clicking with a stylus.

- Assorted other small fixes.
- Localisation improvements.

[JacobThePhotographer]

I was searching for forum discussion  issues I have with my recent upgrade to metal when I came across this upgrade post. 
Thanks for all the hard work !!

My issue:
When reducing noise in a big file I do not see the changes 'live' but only in the final output. A sort of hit & miss maction. 
Is it perhaps my metal card ?
My setup:
Mac Pro 5.1 // 32 Gb RAM // SSD system drive 50 % full // Hybrid Data drives 40% full  - Graphics card: AMD Radeon RX 460 2 GB 

I still have the option to exchange for the much faster AMD Radeon RX 580 Nitro 4GB 

Would that larger and faster card fix the 'not live noise rendering' ? AND : be worth the extra expense in general ?
Often I work on 1 - 3 - 4 Gb panoramas. 

Thanks !
Jacob