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Affinity Photo Customer Beta (1.7.0.101)


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  • Staff

Status: Beta

Purpose: Features, Improvements, Fixes

Requirements: Purchased Affinity Photo

Mac App Store: Not submitted

Download: Download

Hello,

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the fourth beta of Affinity Photo 1.7 for macOS.

Photo 1.7 is a (very) significant change to the currently shipping 1.6 version, so, as ever, I would strongly urge users to avoid the 1.7 beta for critical work. This is especially true as this is only the fourth of many beta builds we will release before 1.7 ships. Things will be broken in this build - please use it to explore the new features and not for real work.

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.

It’s also worth noting that we aren’t done yet - we are still working through reported bugs from previous releases and hope to fix as many as possible before the final release of 1.7.

With all that said, we hope that you will enjoy the new capabilities introduced in this release and we look forward to any and all feedback you give to us.

Many thanks (as always),

Affinity Photo Team  :ph34r:

 

Changes This Build

 

- Fixed CMYK rendering when using Metal.
- Fixed loading of huge JPEG files.
- Added “Alpha Similarity” to Select Sampled Colour tool.
- Fixed a number of crash bugs in the adjustment panel.
- Fixed issues with some existing user documents crashing in 1.7.
- Assorted other fixes.

 

Changes In Previous Builds

 

- Show the Curves / Levels histogram in the correct colour space.
- Fixed some GPU memory management issues.
- A further attempt to fix the HSL UI crash.
- Improve performance on Intel Iris Pro GPUs.
- Improved help.

- Numerous other small fixes.


- Fixed hardware acceleration issues on certain iMac devices.
- Fixed a number of brush bugs.
- Fixed hang in HDR merge with GPU enabled.
- Fixed HSL adjustment UI crash,
- Fixed Procedural Texture UI issues when switching from dark to light UI.
- Fixed Curves adjustment clamping issue when GPU is enabled.
- Fixed 3DLUT adjustments when GPU is enabled.
- Fixed issues with sub-brush UI.
- Numerous other small fixes.

- Added pixabay.com to Stock panel.

- New welcome screen graphics.
- New persona icon graphics.
- New splash screen.


Changes Since 1.6 Release


Performance

- The core processing engine in Affinity Photo has been rewritten to take advantage of the powerful discrete AMD GPUs in modern Mac hardware. It will now automatically use any compatible discrete GPU, alongside the Intel GPU support present in 1.6. Typically this improves compositing / editing performance by at least 1000%. Performance when using integrated Intel GPUs has also been massively improved.

- External GPUs (eGPU) are also supported - including hot-plug-and-unplug support.

- Multiple GPUs are supported - if you have more than 1 GPU (ie. Intel + AMD in MacBook Pro, or Intel + eGPU in other Macs) Photo will use them all, at the same time, to improve performance. There is no limit to the number of GPUs which can be used.


Brushes

- Photo 1.7 introduces a new “sub-brush” mechanism, developed in conjunction with Paolo Limoncelli (DAUB® Brushes). This exciting feature allows any brush to have a list of other brushes attached which will draw at the same time. Each sub-brush has a fully separate and customisable set of dynamics. You can control when the sub-brushes are drawn and how they blend with the main brush.

- The brush engine in Photo has been rewritten to use the new GPU architecture described above. With GPU support, even huge brushes with 1% spacing will perform well. All brushes / brush tools are accelerated.

- Symmetry (up to 32-way) is now supported - including on-canvas controls and optional mirroring. We have more symmetry features on the way - so stay tuned during the beta process.

- Wet edges and accumulation are now available on colour brushes and brushes with HSL variance.

- Brushes with multiple nozzle textures have always chosen the nozzle at random. In 1.7, the nozzle choice has a dynamic controller and ramp for greater control.

- All brush tools now support left and right arrow keys for rotation - a common feature request ;)


RAW

- The RAW processing engine in Photo has been rewritten - producing better results and improved performance. It also takes advantage of the GPU architecture changes described above.

- RAW files now load much more quickly - especially if you have a compatible GPU.

- Reimplemented support for XTrans sensors.

- The denoise algorithm has been rewritten. It produces better results and takes advantage of the new GPU architecture.

- Hot pixel removal is now automatically performed by the Serif Labs engine.

- Profiled lens correction are more stable, apply more quickly, and can be toggled in the Develop UI.

- The histogram in the Develop persona is now presented in the output colour space - as opposed to always being linear.


Filters

- New “Procedural Texture” filter with advanced presets support.

- New “Voronoi” filter.

- Denoise, Clarity and Shadows / Highlights filters have been rewritten (using technology from the Develop Persona).

- More filters are now available as Live Filters - including the new Procedural Texture filter.

- Live filters have been rewritten to improve performance - especially when multiple filters are used in a document.

- Improved Polar to Rectangular and Rectangular to Polar filters.


Adjustments

- The HSL adjustment layer has been rewritten. It now supports custom hue ranges, a new algorithm, new UI and picker controls.

- The Levels adjustment layer now supports output levels - a common feature request.

- The White Balance adjustment layer has been rewritten.

- The Selective Colour adjustment layer has been rewritten.

- PSD import / export of adjustments has been improved.

- The Vibrance adjustment layer has been rewritten.

- The Recolour adjustment layer has gained a lightness slider.


Tools

- The Crop tool has been rewritten - it now supports resolution changes, absolute pixel size and has a much improved preset mechanism.

- The Sponge Brush tool now gives more correct / pleasant results.

- A general tools overhaul has been performed - providing editing of grids, guides, page origin, across multiple tools (not just in the Move tool)


General

- “Alternate futures” for document history have been added. Traditionally, if you roll back the undo history then do something else all your changes after that point are lost. Photo will now display a small branch icon in the history tab when you do this. Pressing that button will cycle between all the different “futures” after that history entry - meaning you will never lose work you have done.

- HEIF images can now be loaded directly into Photo. If they contain a depth map, this will also be loaded as a second layer. Because depth maps are typically lower resolution than the main image, optional “smart” upsampling will be performed.

- A large number of new cameras are supported for RAW development (we will provide a list of the new supported cameras as soon as possible!).

- The batch process dialog now fully supports expressions for height and width - available constants are “w”, “h” and “dpi”.

- Photo now supports custom document presets - a popular feature request.

- A new blend mode - Linear Burn - has been added.

- New “Move inside / outside” commands have been added - useful for quick operations on clipping masks etc.

- The Hard Mix blend mode has been improved.

- New provider options have been added to the stock panel - support for Unsplash and Pexels. Both of these providers offer full-resolution stock imagery which is free to use.

- Metadata is now dynamically synchronised with your document - so if you resize then export, the values will be correct.

- Numerous text improvements have been made - including new features.

- Significant PDF import / export improvements and fixes.

 - Numerous other bug fixes - too many to list!

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  • Staff
8 minutes ago, DreamLight Images said:

Thank you again for making the beta public. How should we report bugs that we found? Here in this thread?

 

Cheers.

Posting in these announcement threads makes for a very difficult thread to follow as soon as more than one person does it. Also these threads are locked when new updates are released, stopping discussion in its tracks 

Consequently, Please make new threads in this forum.one bug in each thread if you have more than one bug. Thanks for asking.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Any reason the beta version number is never part of the download aka the file names? - IMO using affinity-photo-customer-beta-1.7.0.101.dmg would be much more meaningful, especially in terms of the higher actual fluctuation of beta version downloads, or in order to see what already has been downloaded by users.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Any reason the beta version number is never part of the download aka the file names? - IMO using affinity-photo-customer-beta-1.7.0.101.dmg would be much more meaningful, especially in terms of the higher actual fluctuation of beta version downloads, or in order to see what already has been downloaded by users.

The reason is that previously people were finding old announcement threads (social media and Google search results) and downloading earlier beta builds that included version numbers (we rarely took those files down). By overwriting the one file all earlier links to that filename still point to the latest download, which is resulting in fewer reports of bugs that have subsequently been fixed. I keep a backup of earlier installers by adding the number, but the QA team are one of the few groups who really need to run earlier builds.

Having said that, I acknowledge that we ourselves are not always 100% consistent with this across our beta forums.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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14 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

...which is resulting in fewer reports of bugs that have subsequently been fixed.

Ah if that works better for you that way then it's Ok from logistics! - However personally I always have to rename the downloads from here, in order to not oversee if I possibly might already have downloaded a specific beta version and since it's default filename won't tell me otherwise. Well let's call it developer versioning habits.

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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