Affinity Photo for iPad was unveiled today during an exclusive presentation segment at Apple’s keynote event in San Jose, California. The app is available to download, with a special price of $19.99.

Affinity Photo is already the choice of thousands of professional photographers, retouchers and editors around the world. Now Affinity Photo for iPad redefines photo editing once again – to create an ultra-fast, powerful and immersive experience at home, in the studio or on the move.

Attention to every detail has been at the heart of the approach to developing the iPad version of Affinity Photo, as Ashley Hewson, Managing Director of Affinity Photo developer Serif, explains.

“Each tool, panel and control has been completely reimagined to optimise for touch – either with fingertip or Apple Pencil,” says Hewson.

“All rendering, adjustments and filter effects have been fully hardware-accelerated. The result is a genuinely unique new way to interact with your images and your iPad, with performance you’ll find hard to believe.”

Affinity Photo for iPad draws its heritage from the award-winning Mac version; renowned for its sophisticated tools for enhancing, editing and retouching images in an incredibly intuitive interface.

Professional features never seen before on iPad include:

• Optimised for iPad capabilities: Multi-touch UI, Metal accelerated, intuitive Apple Pencil support andfull iCloud drive integration.
• Complete retouching tools: Including dodge, burn, clone, blemish, patch and red eye tools. You’ll also find an incredibly accurate inpainting brush along with full frequency separation capability.
• Non-destructive adjustments: Correct and enhance images with Levels, Curves, Black and White, White Balance, HSL, Shadows and Highlights and over a dozen other adjustments that are previewed instantly and can be edited any time. Adjust, readjust, and drag and drop onto any layer, group, mask, or in any place in a stack to control how they’re applied.
• Super accurate selections: Critical whether cutting out objects, creating masks or selectively applying adjustments. Affinity Photo’s selection refinement algorithm is one of the most advanced available, making selections—even down to individual strands of hair—easier than ever before.
• Comprehensive Liquify Workspace: Push your images around with your fingertips or use brushes like turbulence, pinch, punch and twirl in a dedicated liquify persona. Alongside a real-time mesh warp tool, it’s perfect to reshape, sculpt and deform photos.
• Real time effects: Affinity Photo comes with a huge range of high-end filters including lighting, blurs, distortions, tilt-shift, shadows, glows and many more. Full control is given over every aspect of a filter’s properties with incredibly precise controls—all the while seeing a real-time live preview of the result. Best of all, filters can be applied as live layers, enabling you to edit, erase away, or mask effects after they have been applied.
• Comprehensive RAW editing: Develop camera RAW files in a dedicated built-in workspace with all the processing adjustments and corrections you need.
• Unsurpassed file compatibility: Unrivalled PSD support plus all the standards including PNG, JPG, TIFF, EPS, PDF, and SVG.
• Work in any colour space: RGB, CMYK, LAB, Greyscale. End-to-end CMYK workflow with ICC colour management, and 32-bit per channel editing.
• HDR Merge with tone mapping: Allows you to merge multiple exposure brackets together into a single unbounded 32-bit image, with full tone mapping control for incredibly dramatic results.

Whether you’re working on iOS, Windows or Mac, the back-end engine of Affinity Photo is the same. This means 100% perfect file compatibility, including shared undo history.

Affinity Photo for iPad delivers so much more than pure photo editing. As well as being able to handle unlimited layers, there’s a full library of adjustment layers, layer effects and live filter layers to choose from. Text tools with full advanced typography options, and vector drawing tools are available too, while all layers can be grouped, clipped, masked or blended together to enable the creation of specular compositions.

The software was announced today during Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, and is now available for purchase. Compatible with iPad Air 2, iPad 2017, iPad Pro 9.7-inch, 10.5-inch and 12.9-inch, it’s priced at an introductory discount of more than 30 per cent – £19.99 / $19.99 / 21,99€ from the App Store. After the introductory offer, Affinity Photo for iPad will be priced £28.99 / $29.99 / 32,99€.