Originally published at: Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher 2.6 - TidBITS
Serif has updated Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher to version 2.6 with Affinity’s first machine-learning features for Affinity Photo, page management improvements for Affinity Publisher, and minor enhancements to Affinity Designer. The new Object Selection tool in Affinity Photo automatically selects objects of your choosing, while the Select Subject feature analyzes an image and selects what it considers to be the main subject of the scene. Both machine-learning features work only on Apple silicon Macs (and iPads) and require downloading the relevant pre-trained model. Serif notes these features are optional and won’t use any of your data for further training.
Affinity Publisher adds support for spreads that contain more than two pages (such as trifold, gatefold, accordion-fold, and other page arrangements), adds new options for managing pages (Reflow Pages, Reflow Through Spread, and Add Pages), brings new page migration improvements (including Split Masters, Move Master Content, and Anchor Toward Spine), enables QR codes to be generated using data from a data merge source, improves auto-flowing of text frames to more consistently add the correct number of pages, and ensures better consistency between Add, Delete, Copy and Move page operations.
Affinity Designer adds several new options to the Pencil Tool, including Auto Close, Smoothness, and Use Line Style (which lets you adopt the currently set stroke properties from the Stroke Panel). All three apps receive Color Picker improvements, improve size variance and pressure handling in the Stroke Width tool, and make Vector and Pixel Brushes searchable. (Affinity Designer, $69.99 new; Affinity Photo, $69.99; Affinity Publisher, $69.99; all three are available separately or together for $164.99 from Serif and are also available individually from the Mac App Store; free updates, various sizes, release notes, macOS 10.15+)