It’s a tribute to the hard work and ambition of Serif’s Affinity team that on the same day that they pushed major updates for both Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, they discovered that Apple have named Affinity Photo the Best Mac App of 2015. Today’s award from Apple comes just 10 months after we first got our hands on Affinity Photo’s beta release, and 5 months to the day that Affinity Photo was launched.

There are so many developers creating fantastic products nowadays, so it’s really very humbling to be recognised in this way — Ashley Hewson, Serif

Building on the already popular application, today’s release is the first major update to Affinity Photo. The biggest new feature of which is super-accurate image alignment, which enables both image stacking and panorama stitching; invaluable tools for artworking.

The accuracy of panorama stitching in the app really is as good as it gets–and with Affinity Photo’s advanced memory management you can build up images of 100s of mega-pixels and still have incredible performance when you go to edit — Ashley Hewson, Serif

What’s really impressive is that Serif claim to have made performance improvements; as most fans of the application will tell you, it’s so fast already, it’s hard to imagine where they could possibly find any extra speed. In addition to panorama stitching, image stacking, and performance gains, the Affinity Photo update includes:

• Improved PSD compatibility
• Liquify feature
• Updated RAW support
• Haze removal
• 6 extensions for Apple Photos on El Capitan

Affinity Photo isn’t the only award-winning application Serif make, Affinity Designer was recognized in its own right with a Design Award from Apple back in June. It too has received a major update today with a raft of new features. The biggest addition for Affinity Designer are its new artboard capabilities. Not only can you create artboards of any size, including common device sizes, but you can group them, and nest them. What’s more Affinity Designer now allows you to create artboards of any shape, not just rectilinear. Perfect when designing UI for wearables.

Without doubt artboards have been our most requested new feature since we launched…It really is a must-have feature for UI and responsive design, so it’s great to be widening the use case of Affinity Designer into these areas too. — Ashley Hewson, Serif

In addition to artboards, the latest Affinity Designer includes:

• Improved typography controls
• Rotatable canvas
• Professional print features
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts
• Improved support for PSD, PDF, SVG, and EPS formats

The updates for Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are free downloads for existing customers, and the planned 1 week 20% discount for new customers has just been extended for as long as Apple run their Best of 2015 feature on the App Store. That means both apps are currently available for the one-time price of $39.99.