Affinity Photo Customer Beta (1.9.4.243)

[Andy Somerfield]

Status: Beta

Purpose: Features, improvements and fixes.

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo

Mac App Store: Not submitted

Download ZIP: Download

Auto-update: Available

 

Hello,

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the fourth build of Affinity Photo 1.9.4 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 1.9.3 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.

The 1.9.4 beta will have a performance focus as we circle back to clean up some inefficiencies which have crept in over time. If you notice performance improvements (or regressions!) over 1.9.3, or if you notice rendering bugs which appear to have been introduced in 1.9.4, please let us know.

Affinity Photo Team  

 

Changes Since Previous Beta

- Serif Labs RAW engine improvements.
- Assorted astro stacking improvements and fixes.
- Fixed Nikon D780 Raw loading when using Serif Labs engine.
- Attempted fix for occasional flickering of rendered document.
- Fixed crash when deleting a procedural texture constant while the cursor is still in the description text field.
- Fixed erratic behaviour with placed images.
- Fixed missing controls when procedural texture dialog is in non-English.
- Fixed crash when macro recording selected layer change in Japanese UI.
- Fixed lockups when loading certain PSD documents with smart objects enabled.
- Assorted small fixes.
- Help improvements.

 

Additional Changes Since 1.9.3

 

- Added the ability to open FITS files directly, with control over demosaicing.

- Performance and memory usage improvements when using placed images.
- Performance and memory usage improvements when using embedded documents.
- PDF import and export improvements.
- Significant performance improvements in low memory situations.

- Fixed small visual issues when switching back to templates from presets in the new document panel.
- Fixed gradient map adjustment rendering issues.
- Fixed expression input issues with decimal separators other than ".".
- Fixed issue whereby ISO speed was incorrectly reported for some images.

- Help improvements.

- Added support for Xtrans sensor images in astro stacking.
- Added GPU acceleration for blending ranges (in Advanced Blending).
- Further, significant, performance improvements for documents with many layers.
- Significant performance improvements when converting documents between ICC profiles / pixel formats.

- Fixed performance issues with previous build with certain GPUs.
- Fixed spare channel / mask editing.

- Assorted metadata panel tweaks.
- Further panorama stitching performance tweaks.

- Added a new "median" mode to the frequency separation filter.
- The gradient map adjustment now has a GPU implementation.

- Restored the GPU rendering improvements which were dropped towards the end of the 1.9.2 beta. The benchmark version is once again set to 1920.
- Improve performance when manipulating the selected layer immediately after loading a document.
- Significant performance improvements in low-memory situations, reducing use of the swap file.
- Panorama stitching performance improvements.
- Significant performance improvements for documents which contain flattened, opaque layers (usually the result of merge visible).
- Render EXIF exposure time as decimal if above 1.

- Fixed F-number always showing as "f/0" for Leica M-series cameras (and others).
- Fixed issue whereby LUTs would incorrectly report "Identity" as the description.
- Fixed potential crash when quitting with layers still on the clipboard.
- Fixed performance issues with CMYK documents when GPU acceleration is enabled.

- Assorted small fixes.
- Localisation improvements.

[abarkalo]

I don't know if it's this particular beta version or the last one but this thing is blazing fast. Also sleep mode is now working so that I have 0.0% CPU whenever Affinity is running or only 0.5% CPU when a large image is open and the window is hidden - in other words, amazing. I am using an M1 Macbook Pro and getting very high battery time (15-20 hours) while having all your apps open. My Intel i9 machine running Photoshop, by comparison, was only able to get about an hour and a noisy hour at that.

The one slow tool has been the inpainting tool, which was considerably slower than Photoshop's, is now it's catching up especially in the new beta.

 

[MarvinR]

Running on Mac mini M1 (2020) 16GB RAM performance was excellent.  The only time I saw any hit on performance is when I had to switch to run using Rosetta so I could see if it worked with Nik Collection. When I did that the startup time was slower but once editing responsiveness/performance was excellent. Using the tools I usually use, I saw no problems. 

[Murfee]

On 5/17/2021 at 9:11 AM, Andy Somerfield said:

Fixed missing controls when procedural texture dialog is in non-English.

Thank You 😀