Affinity Photo 1.6 comes with a raft of performance tweaks

Serif has released an update to Affinity Photo, its professional photo-editing application. Affinity Photo 1.6 comes with a raft of performance enhancements, more advanced text options, and new 'light' user interface and clever new 'stabilised' brush tool for smoother paint effects.

The new brush stabiliser works in 'rope' or 'window' mode. In rope mode it acts as if you're dragging the brush tip at the end of a small rope – it sounds crazy but it's immediately intuitive and smooths brushstrokes really effectively. It should prove useful to digital artists in particular, but also photographers who want to add 'glow' effects to images and object outlines.

Serif says Affinity Photo 1.6 is faster, smoother and more powerful before with improved panning and zooming, and that Live Filters performance has been improved. Live Filters have long been a selling point of Affinity Photo, enabling photographers to see the effect of a filter directly on the image while making adjustments.

New font chooser

For those who need to add text to their images, Affinity Photo 1.6 brings a new font chooser drop-down menu with tabs for All fonts, Recent, Used and Favourites and, amongst other enhancements, new vertical alignment options within text frames.

If you shoot 360-degree images, you'll now be able to correct image roll, and Serif says it's improved support for Photoshop plug-ins, which can be used from within Affinity Photo once your plug-in folders have been located and added in its Preferences window.

Mac owners using Apple Photos to organise their image collections can now open images directly in Affinity Photo 1.6 from within the program, but while it was originally a Mac-only program, Affinity Photo is also available in a Windows version too.

One of its major selling points is that it offers the power of Photoshop, but as a subscription-free purchase. It's also dramatically cheaper than Photoshop ever was when it was available on a 'perpetual' licence, and costs just £48.99/$49.99.