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Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher updated to version 1.8, custom keyboard shortcuts come to iPad

Today Serif pushed updates to all three of its popular subscription-free creative apps, including Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Apple’s Mac app of the year winner, Affinity Publisher ($49.99 each). Versions 1.8 are available for download now via the Mac and iOS App Store.

Affinity Publisher’s update includes support for IDML for importing Adobe InDesign files. There’s also preflight checking, which will display live instances of potential document errors. Errors includes things like low image resolution, overflowing text assets, bleed hazards, spelling issues, missing images and fonts, and more.

One of the headline features for Affinity Photo and Designer is support for smart objects in PSD imports, which maintains the full resolution and edibility of layers within any object. The rest of the features found in version 1.8 can be seen in the change logs below.

IDML support in Publisher 1.8

Affinity Publisher 1.8

  • Ability to save documents as templates to re-use time and again on future projects.
  • Combine multiple Affinity Publisher documents together into a single file, with smart merge of master pages, text styles, table of contents and indexes.
  • Excel (xlsx) file import to instantly bring in tables of data from spreadsheets.
  • Many other improvements and fixes, including PDF export being up to five times faster than before.

Preflight checking in Affinity Publisher

Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer 1.8

  • Affinity Designer adds a new stock panel to instantly search and drag and drop stock imagery into your work.
  • Affinity Photo and Designer on iPad get the ability to customize keyboard shortcuts, in the same way as you can on Windows and Mac.
  • Affinity Photo now has full compatibility with the latest Nik Collection plug-ins, following a collaboration between Affinity developers and Nik owner DxO.

For a full granular list of changes, be are to see the version histories on the App Store.

Customizable keyboard shortcuts on iPad

iPad users also get an exciting update, as Serif adds a new customizable keyboard shortcut feature in version 1.8 of Affinity Photo and Designer ($19.99 each). Users can now go into Preferences > Shortcuts, and apply customizable shortcuts across all personas, just like you can on the desktop apps.

Affinity Photo and Designer were already professional grade apps on the iPad, and this update further validates its ability to replace a desktop editor or design application if necessary.

If you already own these Affinity apps, then the updates can be downloaded free of charge on the Mac or iOS App Store. Affinity desktop apps can also be purchased directly from Serif, and Windows versions are available as well.

Do you use any Affinity apps? What do you think about these latest updates?

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