All the bug reports are relatively minor too.' An impressive debut app for a company with no prior experience coding for OS X - Affinity isn't merely a port of Serif's DrawPlus for Windows. 'We've seen over 4,000 sign ups in the first day of release and have had very few reported crash issues.

'Reaction to the beta has been overwhelmingly positive,' Ashley Hewson, Serif's managing director, told us.

At such a reasonable price, that makes DrawPlus X4 a very attractive proposition.Following the reveal of Affinity Designer for Mac OS X earlier this week, we spoke to Serif to find out why it switched from making software just for Microsoft Windows, whether its vector graphics package has what it takes to challenge the might of Adobe's Illustrator, and what customers have to look forward to in the near future. There’s also a new super-sampling option that builds on traditional anti-aliasing to improve the smoothness and quality of image output.ĭrawPlus X4 doesn’t provide all of the power of CorelDRAW or Illustrator, but it doesn’t do badly, and thanks to the new PhotoLab tool it also throws in much of the power of Photo-PAINT or Photoshop.

This is mainly focused on bitmap standards such as JPEG, PNG and TIFF (but not PSD), with new support for SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Even better, the PhotoLab handling remains non-destructive so you can always recall the dialog and fine-tune its effect retrospectively.įor output, DrawPlus X4 offers dedicated options for publishing to PDF, Flash and CAD/CAM formats, but the main output route is the Image Export dialog. This means you can fine-tune the interaction of all filters to get the best possible results. When you like the look of your effect as shown on the large central preview, you can commit it and the parameters involved are added to the list of filters running down the right. These are represented by small thumbnail previews and clicking on them applies common effects, ranging from boosting colour intensity or warmth to adding film grain, vignetting and some impressive artistic effects. The PhotoLab also caters for the less confident designer with its range of preset adjustments and effects.

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