Serif has released Affinity Photo version 1.7, which gives the photo editing software a massive speed boost, support for HDR monitors and a slew of new editing tools.
With the Affinity Photo 1.7 update, Mac users will find a 10x increase in speed thanks to end-to-end Metal compute acceleration that takes full advantage of the Mac’s discrete GPU.
This speeds up all raster layer and brush operations, and the apps now also support multiple GPUs — whether internal or with external units connected —multiplying the performance further.
Serif says it will release an update to its Windows version in the near future that will roll out hardware acceleration for PC users. However, Windows version users will also benefit from Affinity Photo 1.7’s rewritten memory management system, which provides 3x or 4x speed improvements across many tasks on Windows machines.
Version 1.7 also introduces full support for the latest HDR / EDR monitors, allowing users to see more detail in raw files.
Other enhancements in Affinity Photo 1.7 include an improved iPad interface, a rewritten brush engine that adds new multi-brushes, a faster raw processing engine with improved noise reduction and a new demosaicing algorithm and a revamped batch processing system.
Affinity Photo is priced at $39.99 for the desktop version and $15.99 for the iPad version. Existing users can download the update for free.
Visit Serif’s Affinity website for more information.