Acorn 8.7 is out, and it’s got some fun new features, many of which have been requested for years.

Two new brush types: Repair and “Synth Fill”, which let you brush away unwanted objects in your photos. The Repair tool uses Metal kernels to quickly look around the area that needs to be touched up, and fills in using similar pixels to what it finds. Repair is kind of like a super clone tool. The Synth Fill tool uses ML to do a deeper dive into the image to figure out what it can synthetically create to fill in. This is also known as inpainting, or generative fill, and uses a downloaded model to work. (I like the approach of having the ML models downloaded as needed, since it can keep Acorn’s file size small, make updates quicker, and if you aren’t a fan of these things, the models never have to sit on your computer.)

You can now resize multiple selected bitmap layers at once, even with a selection. And speaking of selections, there’s a new “Expand Selection” option in the Selection palette which lets you non-destructively expand the current selection by a set number of pixels. (Finally.)

New filters: Temperature and Tint, Edge Stroke, and a High Pass filter.

SVG improvements include new options when opening an SVG file, as well as writing out bitmap layers when exporting (finally).

Photoshop image import also has improvements: Support for reading 16-bit-per-channel PSD files, grayscale PSDs, and the Color Overlay layer effect. If you have a PSD that doesn’t open up in Acorn correctly, please let us know!

Also new, which I apparently completely forgot to include in the release notes, is an updated non-Liquid Glass layout. While the edge-to-edge layout looks nice and contemporary, I feel like it doesn’t work best for an image editor. It can be overly distracting and gives the feeling of covering up your images. So I’ve brought back the standard canvas layout, where the tools aren’t floating over the canvas, and the toolbar is plainly a toolbar. The edge-to-edge UI is still there as an option for those of you who prefer it.

There are more features, improvements, and of course bug fixes. Check out the full release notes for all the details.