Version 2. What's new?

Tons of new features. A completely redesigned UI. Hundreds of performance enhancements and workflow improvements. Here’s everything you should know about the next generation of Affinity…

You want it? You got it.

Publisher for iPad.

Work wherever and whenever you want, without compromising the quality of your work, with Affinity Publisher for iPad—a pro page design app that allows you to create incredible layouts on the go.

Ta-da!

V2 delivers a creative experience unlike any other. Discover the wealth of new features and enhancements across the whole suite of apps below.

Vector Warp

This hugely powerful and highly requested addition allows you to apply a non-destructive vector warp over any vector artwork or text. Editing any warp offers a super-fast live preview, even on complex illustrations and gives a true vector end result.

Shape Builder Tool

Add and subtract shapes and segments in a much easier, more interactive way. Quickly create complex shapes by simply dragging between segments to combine or holding a modifier to subtract.

Knife Tool

Slice any shape, curve or text into component parts faster than ever.

Measure Tool & Area Tool

Measure line lengths, segments, distances and areas of any objects to scale.

X-Ray View

A new view mode to show the makeup of your work, particularly useful for targeted selection of a specific curve/object within complex artwork.

DXF / DWG Import

Import and edit AutoCAD and DXF files quickly and accurately, maintaining the layer structure and scale of the original file.

Non-destructive RAW Develop

Develop RAW files non-destructively and choose to embed into a document file or link externally.

Tip: if you have a Universal License and own Publisher 2, you can use StudioLink to place RAW files into your documents and edit the development settings at any time (something no other publishing app offers!).

Live Masks

Build powerful, non-destructive workflows with new live masks which update automatically based on the properties of the underlying image.

Hue Range

Create a mask based on a specific color and apply adjustments, effects or just paint on the automatically generated mask for your chosen hue.

Band-pass

Band-pass allows the creation of a mask to be focused around edges within an image. This has wide uses for re-touchers who work on different frequency layers, but also enables the creation of artistic effects.

Luminosity

Specify a luminosity range to mask; for example, isolate specific ranges of highlights or shadows (or anything in between) and apply controlled adjustments to those areas.

Compound Masks

Easily combine multiple mask layers together non-destructively using add, intersect, subtract and XOR operations. This means separate masks you’ve created can be maintained non-destructively while you create new masks based on those component parts.

Live Mesh Warp

Want an image or file to be distorted to match the surface of an underlying template? Now you can apply a non-destructive warp to make that happen, and go back to edit whenever you like.

Bonus: This has some powerful use cases when using the Photo Persona in Publisher 2. You can distort linked files without losing the integrity of the link, as well as warp picture frames to enable quick drag and drop of alternate images.

Brush Engine

Improvements

Re-order nozzles by drag/drop. Use any swatch for intensity brushes, including gradient and bitmap fills. Plus: new distance controller, brush tip interpolation and overall improved performance and accuracy.

Books

Combine separate Publisher documents as chapters to create one long publication, automatically synching page numbers, table of contents, indexes and styles throughout – an especially useful feature for collaboration, as contributors can work on their own sections individually before bringing it all together. Available in desktop version only.

Footnotes, Endnotes and Sidenotes

Add academic style notes or references to sections of text.

Place Auto-flow

Create a single layout that automatically repeats across your document until all desired images are accommodated. Plus, with the ability to choose a repeat count for images, you can set up advanced templates so that in the future you can instantly produce multiple variants in only a few clicks.

Linked File Layer Visibility Override

Turn any layers on or off from within placed files, including PSD, PDF, DWG, DXF and other Affinity documents without losing the integrity of the link. Even if the source file is changed, your layer visibility settings will be maintained. Also available in Designer 2 and Photo 2.

Style picker tool

Quickly apply the style of any object or text on your page to another. Also available in Designer 2 and Photo 2 (desktop only).

Performance

We’ve reengineered how we handle memory for imported PDFs and other large documents, resulting in significant performance improvements.

Refined & Redesigned

The all-new UI doesn’t just give a brand-new look to the apps, but also provides many workflow improvements.

Desktop.

New Document now includes a much more accessible list of presets, easier preset management and organization, the ability to flag presets as favorites as well as a clearer preview and document summary.

Recent documents are now available to view as thumbnail previews or a list. You can also pin your documents for quick access.

The completely revamped Layers Panel has a ton of new functionality, including:

Clearer drop zones for dropping inside, masking and reordering
New parent bar to easily collapse groups and drop layers above or below their current parent
New quick menu (right click on visibility icon) for color tagging
Option to show/hide other layers
Drag across multiple layers’ visibility at once to instantly show/hide those layers
Drag FX icon to copy layer effects to other layers (or drag to trash)
Ability to lock layers without selecting first
New option to show icons denoting layer type (pixel, image, text, curve, etc)

Along with the existing triangle wheel, the optimized Color Panel has a new box color wheel, which makes it easier for you to change saturation without changing luminosity and vice versa by moving vertically and horizontally.

See recent raster brushes by layer. Any pixel layers you have painted on now offer a drop-down list of the brushes you have used on that layer, making it much easier to pick up where you left off, even after making heavy edits to your document in between.

iPad.

As well as having nearly all the new feature additions mentioned above, the iPad versions have some of their own special enhancements:

Quick Menu — Gain instant access to clipboard options and nine customizable shortcut operations with a simple three-finger swipe.

Command Controller — This new radial menu gives quick access to common modifiers in all tools.

Compact Mode — New mode available for the Layers Panel allows you to keep the panel open while maximizing document real estate.

All-new context bar — For all tools, making many more options easily accessible.

New sliders for attributes — Like brush width and opacity, stroke width, filter effect settings and more.

Zoom to fit/zoom to previous, snapping and preview mode options — Now available in the top toolbar.

iPadOS 16

Ready

All iPad apps are now optimized to take advantage of the increased memory limits available since iPadOS 15. Customers of iPadOS 16 will also get the added benefit of the new virtual memory swap – dramatically increasing performance on very large documents.

And that’s not all…

Multiple layer effects — Outline, Inner Shadow, Color Overlay, Gradient Overlay and Outer Shadow can all now have multiple instances applied to the same object. Available in all apps.

Quick grid — Quickly create a grid of any object as you draw it, including shapes, text frames and photo frames, by using arrow keys. Available in all apps, but especially useful in Publisher (desktop only).

Quick bitmap fill — Instantly add seamless bitmap texture fill to any shape by drag and drop. The source texture can be dragged directly from your files or your Assets Panel within Affinity apps. You can now also set bitmap textures to scale with an object (desktop only).

Pencil Tool improvements — New straight line mode and auto-close options available, the latter of which now allows you to automatically connect the final node with the first node by releasing the mouse button (Designer 2).

Nominate key object — Gain control over exactly what you want to align to, subtract from and other functions (Designer 2).

Content Link

All major content types, including Assets, Brushes, Swatches and Styles are now linked between Affinity apps on your device. This means if you create a new brush in Affinity Photo, this will become instantly available to you in the Pixel Persona of Designer and the Photo Persona of Publisher. Or if you drag a new asset into one of your asset categories, again that will be available across all three apps.

You can easily control whether or not you want any of your content categories linked, too.

Force scale everything — This new option in the Transform Panel allows you to override any individual scale settings so you can force all strokes, effects and fills to scale with whatever your currently selected object is set to (all apps).

Normals Adjustment — Adjust lighting information baked into existing normal maps. Great as standalone feature for texture artists, but also allows the editing of lighting layers generated from 3D render software (Photo 2).

Show pixel grid — This new option to expose a pixel grid when zoomed in improves editing accuracy (Photo 2).

Create new document from Stock Panel — Drag straight from Stock Panel to top toolbar to create a new file from a stock image (all apps, desktop only).

JPEG XL import/export — Affinity Photo has been a leader in editing wide color gamut and HDR images, with full support for full HDR displays, but now external developers can see what you see in Affinity Photo thanks to this new export option.

Word & character count — Get a word, character, line and paragraph count of your document or current selection (Publisher 2).

Resave package — Resave a package with the resource content being updated automatically. Hugely efficient and prevents duplicate resources being created (Publisher 2, desktop only).

Frame/art text conversion — Convert frame text to art text and vice versa (Publisher 2).

DXF & DWG place — Place DXF or DWG files into your Affinity Publisher publications.

Brush Panel grid view — Option to view your brushes as a grid of nozzles rather than a list of stroke previews. Very useful if you want a greater density of brushes to be visible at once. (Photo 2, desktop only).

Select Same / Select Object — New functionality allows you to scope your selection based on your current artboard or from within your current selection. Plus, Select Same now has options to base on width, height or rotation as well as the option to select hidden objects or not (Designer 2 and Publisher 2, desktop only).

Smart layer states — Save different visibility states of your layer stack to quickly review different design options or versions of your work (Photo 2, desktop only).

Oi, watch it!

We’ll be posting videos regularly on YouTube and social media, including V2 feature demos and more, so make sure you’re following us.

Affinity YouTube

What now?

Ready to dive into a new creative era? See all the buying options on our pricing page. Want to learn more about the individual desktop or iPad apps? Check out the dedicated pages for Photo 2, Designer 2 and Publisher 2. Have questions about V2? Browse our FAQs. For tutorials and other learning resources, head over to our Learn page.

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Version 2 of Affinity apps: What’s new?