Affinity Creative Apps Gain Memory Optimization Update Making Some Tasks Up to 10 Times Quicker

[MacRumors]

Serif today announced across-the-board updates for its popular suite of Affinity creative apps, including Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and the Apple award-winning Affinity Publisher for Mac, all of which were among the first professional creative suites to be optimized for Apple silicon.

For Affinity Publisher, a total rewrite of memory management now enables instant loading times for very large documents, even those with thousands of pages and many gigabytes' worth of linked images. These rewrites have also allowed for smooth live editing and fast scroll, pan and zoom across the whole document.

"We've been excited to see the scale of some of the projects our customers are creating in Affinity Publisher, and knew we could do better to ensure the app remained fast when pushed to the limits," said Ashley Hewson, Managing Director of Affinity developer Serif. "We completely reimagined our memory-handling architecture and the result is that there's really no limit to the size of document you can work on while maintaining that stunning performance."

This performance improvement also extends to Affinity Designer, where the benefit will be most felt by users who import PDF files generated in a CAD app or similar that include hundreds of thousands of objects. Even with less-complex projects, though, everything should feel a lot smoother and snappier, according to the developers.

Elsewhere, Affinity Photo has received "extensive" performance tweaks, so users can expect greater efficiency when blending layers together, while retaining a non-destructive workflow. This version also introduces some options to ensure editing speed remains slick even after building up a complex stack of hundreds of pixel and vector layers, and filter effects, while still maintaining the full layer stack.

Lastly, IDML import in Affinity Publisher is said to be up to four times faster, text flow speeds have nearly doubled, a series of other smaller tweaks and stability improvements have been made to the Affinity suite for version 1.10.

The update is available across all Affinity apps on macOS, Windows and iPad from today and is free to existing users. All Affinity apps are currently available to purchase individually for $60 each on the Affinity website, no subscriptions required.

Article Link: Affinity Creative Apps Gain Memory Optimization Update Making Some Tasks Up to 10 Times Quicker

 

[codq]

I use Affinity Photo every day for work, and the other apps in the suite often. Incredible set of software, these guys deserve all the credit in the world for putting a dent in the Adobe machine.

The universe would rejoice if they released a Premiere or After Effects-style studio.

 

[satchmo]

Is this update referring to v1.9 or a newer version?

The link to the announcement is broken.

 

[Eddy Munn]

We use Affinity Designer—it's such solid software.

 

[MacAffinity]

Is this update referring to v1.9 or a newer version?

The link to the announcement is broken.

It is 1.10, our site taking a bit longer to deploy than planned - should be live in a couple of minutes!

 

[Schnegg]

Big fan of Designer here, it's so fast and intuitive. Kudos!

I'm still not as fluent in Photo as I was in PS, but that's because I try to do everything in Designer ?

 

[Eddy Munn]

It is 1.10, our site taking a bit longer to deploy than planned - should be live in a couple of minutes!

We love your work Affinity team! <3

 

[satchmo]

It is 1.10, our site taking a bit longer to deploy than planned - should be live in a couple of minutes!

Thanks for the response.

Glad I picked up your suite of apps and even more so as they were 50% off.

 

[evertjr]

I use Affinity software everyday and it made my job so much easier, it's better designed and smoother than anything Adobe has ever released and just as powerfull. I've bought it for all platforms (Windows, Mac, iPad). I love you work Affinity team!

 

[idmean]

I had to use Affinity in a past project, and it's extremely confusing if you're used to Adobe. Everything works just differently enough to cause hick-ups all the times and you totally lose focus. The absolutely worst thing is how shift, cmd and alt do something totally different when resizing things. If you're used to Affinity, it may be nice, but it's certainly not a drop-in replacement for Adobe CC as some claim here (and it's also missing some features).

 

[iamgalt]

I'm a big Affinity Photo user, but primarily on iPad. Now if Apple will allow apps to use more than 5 gigs of memory, Affinity can do a similar update for the iPad versions of their software, and make them even better than they already are.

 

[evertjr]

I had to use Affinity in a past project, and it's extremely confusing if you're used to Adobe. Everything works just differently enough to cause hick-ups all the times and you totally lose focus. The absolutely worst thing is how shift, cmd and alt do something totally different when resizing things. If you're used to Affinity, it may be nice, but it's certainly not a drop-in replacement for Adobe CC as some claim here (and it's also missing some features).

I disagree. I worked with Adobe Software all my life and swiching to Affinity was painless because the basic works the same way, even some shortcuts, but others features are actually better implemented and more practical, you just have to learn. Complaning that one software isn't a exact copy of another is just ridiculous, Adobe softwares have many qualities but good UX isn't one of them.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

Meanwhile, Adobe doesn’t know the meaning of optimisation.

 

[satchmo]

I had to use Affinity in a past project, and it's extremely confusing if you're used to Adobe. Everything works just differently enough to cause hick-ups all the times and you totally lose focus. The absolutely worst thing is how shift, cmd and alt do something totally different when resizing things. If you're used to Affinity, it may be nice, but it's certainly not a drop-in replacement for Adobe CC as some claims here (and it's also missing some features).

But the same can be said for Adobe.
No denying there’s an adjustment period (trust me I’ve been an Adobe user for decades).

No app is perfect, and you just hope any gaps are eventually filled. And there are features Affinity has that Adobe CC don’t.

I use both suites but am giving Affinity a serious look and time to truly see if it can be my default production apps.

 

[AltecX]

As a Photoshop user would Photo or Designer be more the parallel? I get the impression that Designer is more like Ilustrator.

 

[japanime]

My company builds all of its books in Affinity Publisher. It was already lightning fast on an M1 Mac. Just keeps getting better and better.

 

[bradman83]

As a Photoshop user would Photo or Designer be more the parallel? I get the impression that Designer is more like Ilustrator.

Photo = Photoshop
Designer = Illustrator
Publisher = InDesign

I‘ve mostly used Photo and it’s a great app both on desktop and iPad. The only thing I find lacking is that I just don’t think their raw engine is as good as Adobe Camera Raw (to say nothing about being on par with even better engines like Capture One or DxO Photolab).

 

[iDento]

I’m a general dentist and Affinity apps helped me design a logo for our practice using Designer, a great looking stationary using Publisher, and we use Photo twice a week to do some basic photo editing for social media marketing.

I own the iPad apps too, it’s useful for when I want to use the Apple Pen. Other than that, I don’t use it much.

I would be over the moon if Affinity released a Photo Managment app, something like Lightroom.

And please, support for RTL languages.

 

[idmean]

I disagree. I worked with Adobe Software all my life and swiching to Affinity was painless because the basic works the same way, even some shortcuts, but others features are actually better implemented and more practical, you just have to learn. Complaning that one software isn't a exact copy of another is just ridiculous, Adobe softwares have many qualities but good UX isn't one of them.

Good for you. I wasn't complaining that it isn't a perfect copy. I was saying that I found it hard to use coming from Adobe. Part of a good UX is being able to get your job done, which Affinity made very hard at times. Just to give one example, everything worked well until I tried to export my file as PDF and it turned out that Affinity had rasterized all embedded PDF's for some unknown reason. I guess it's also a difference if you're voluntarily starting to learn Affinity or not.

 

[Born2Run]

I had to use Affinity in a past project, and it's extremely confusing if you're used to Adobe. Everything works just differently enough to cause hick-ups all the times and you totally lose focus. The absolutely worst thing is how shift, cmd and alt do something totally different when resizing things. If you're used to Affinity, it may be nice, but it's certainly not a drop-in replacement for Adobe CC as some claim here (and it's also missing some features).

I used to use Adobe all the time, but decided to move to Affinity as I didn't want to give Adobe any more money and I couldn't find a reliable torrent to download for free... So I purchased all 3 apps for the Mac and the iPad apps too, it took me maybe 3 hours to come to terms with the software and figure out the differences!
Not once was I confused, I found something that worked differently and then learnt the new way of doing it!

 

[Blue Nova]

I have been on Affinity Designer, Photo and publisher for a while now, almost 5 years designing all my food packaging in Affinity Designer, and it’s far far better than Adobe illustrator .
Hardly any bugs, and unlike Adobe’s illustrator, they fix few bugs but then they introduce new bugs that they fixed few years before. You need help with Adobe illustrator, it will take longer to find what I need by going to YouTube much faster, their option when you select Help, it takes you to all Adobe apps, and have to sort through. The good thing with Affinity, it’s no subscription, you pay once, $49.

 

[idmean]

I used to use Adobe all the time, but decided to move to Affinity as I didn't want to give Adobe any more money and I couldn't find a reliable torrent to download for free... So I purchased all 3 apps for the Mac and the iPad apps too, it took me maybe 3 hours to come to terms with the software and figure out the differences!
Not once was I confused, I found something that worked differently and then learnt the new way of doing it!

Seems you're confirming my point it's not a drop-in replacement. That's all I'm saying.

 

[Ethosik]

Maybe this will fix the constant beach balls I was getting on various Macs with 8GB of RAM and only working on 300x300 images. But I switched back to Adobe and that runs just fine.

 

[Intergalactic_Turkey]

Seems you're confirming my point it's not a drop-in replacement. That's all I'm saying.

Sure it isn't. But name please one currently available on the market drop-in replacement for Adobe CC.

 

[peterholdmann]

I use Affinity Photo every day for work, and the other apps in the suite often. Incredible set of software, these guys deserve all the credit in the world for putting a dent in the Adobe machine.

The universe would rejoice if they released a Premiere or After Effects-style studio.

It would be awesome to have the video apps from Affinity, but for the time being, they fill in the gaps for FCPX/Motion users really well. And you get the whole thing for less than a year of full CreativeCloud, with none of it a subscription.