Serif has launched the latest versions of its award-winning professional desktop apps, photo editing tool Affinity Photo and vector design app Affinity Designer.

Version 1.6 sees a big performance boost across both apps and the option of a light UI among its headline updates. New features also include brush stabilisation and enhanced document handling. (Scroll down for the full list of updates.)

Free bundles

New buyers and existing owners of Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer can also claim a bundle of free creativity-boosting content, including high-res textures, brushes, overlays, icons, buttons and more. Affinity Photo comes with around £105-worth of extras, while Affinity Designer comes with around £60-worth.

This offer closes on 16 November, so you’ll need to move quickly to get the free bundles. Simply follow the prompts in the app to claim the extra goodies.

Unlike with Adobe software, there’s no subscription needed for Serif's Affinity apps. They're a one-off purchase of £48.99 / $49.99 / €54.99 (subject to regional currency variations), and according to Serif, “the free content alone would cost more than the app, if bought separately.”

Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for Mac are available to buy from the App Store, with full optimisation for macOS High Sierra. Windows users can buy direct from Affinity’s website.

Free trials are also available from the website – including for users who have trialled the apps before and were previously unable to download a second trial.

New light user interface option

New stroke stabiliser for all pencil and brush tools

New "Edit In" integration with Apple Photos (Affinity Photo only)

Improved view pan/zoom performance

Improved performance with large documents

New font chooser dropdown with recents, used fonts and favourites

New Glyph browser

Align to key items

Text frame vertical alignment options

Fit frame to text

Custom brush wet edges (Affinity Photo only)

Outlier stacking mode (Affinity Photo only)

Improved Photoshop Plugin support (Affinity Photo only)

Improved Live Filters performance (Affinity Photo only)

Many PDF export improvements including vector export of multi-stop gradients

360 image roll correction (Affinity Photo only)

Numerous bug fixes and other improvements

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