[Affinity Designer compresses my files too small for printers]

Hi there, 

Thanks for your suggestion, I'll try it now. Yes I'm using it for commercial printing. Packaging to be exact.

[Affinity Designer compresses my files too small for printers]

2 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Are you creating a PDF for press? If so, please ensure first that you document color space is CMYK (File > Document Setup > Color). That determines much of the subsequent export features.

I just tested creating an A4 landscape CMYK document and imported there a Sony .ARW file the size of which is 120MB and dimensions 9600 x 6376 pixels, and exported this single page with default PDF (print) and default PDF/X1-a2003 settings and both produced about 4MB file with following kinds of specs:

This was using the default 300dpi resolution which produces 3505 x 2330 pixels in the print file.

Then I created an sRGB PDF from the same page without CMYK conversions and compression or dpi reduction and this produced the following:

...so as can be seen, practically the whole original photo was exported without touching it.

It is all about the settings, but to be able to give exact instructions, I would need to know for what purpose you are creating the document, and if for commercial printing, whether there are any recommendations as forr the kind of PDF that they want to have.

 

 

Hi there, 

I tried it, and I'm not exactly sure where you're seeing those settings. I'm assuming it's outside of the export menu... can you point me to it?

[Affinity Designer compresses my files too small for printers]

So I'm having an issue where I'm creating a package with a large resolution photo (300MB or something), but on export the whole file compresses to a very small size (15MB) and the printer is saying that the photo is losing a ton of resolution as a result. I've tried exporting as an EPS and a PDF both in the Export Persona and via the File Menu and under "more" unticked all options like "downsample" etc. I'm not sure if the photo is importing smaller or if it only loses quality on export. 

I eventually just switched over to Adobe Illustrator to recreate the design and placed the photos (which are PSDs) and the file exported at a size larger than the photo as I originally expected it to. 

Has anyone else ran into this and solved it? I really don't want to switch back to Illustrator after all this great time on Affinity Designer.