Christian W.

Hi Mark, need to get back to this once more: The question wasn’t whether it’s possible to replace a given image fill colour in Affinity Designer. The relevant comparison is if it works in Affinity PUBLISHER, and here’s what I found: While it is right that Affinity Publisher handles PNG files much the same as it handles BMP files (as opposed to Indesign), the bad news is it handles neither of them as it’s supposed to. Here is a direct comparison of placed black-on-white BMP and PNG files in both Indesign (left) and Publisher pages (right): While it's plain impossible, in Indesign, to assign a fill colour to a PNG file, assigning fill to the BMP file results in REPLACING all black with the chosen fill colour. (Which is what makes BMP so valuable in certain layout instances.) Whereas in Affinity Publisher, I can assign fill colours to both BMP and PNG files, but in both cases it doesn’t replace black but only ADDS the fill, resulting in dirty black with a bit of colour glow, rendering the fill option basically useless. So the failure to implement the BMP format actually isn’t constrained to Photo but extends to Publisher, as I see it.

Actually on second thought, I like it not so much. See, what you told me is basically, if you can’t use the Affinity Photo output in InDesign, just switch to Affinity Publisher. That’s not an option at the moment, and probably neither for quite a while. And seriously it’s not an option for a lot of us out there, as long as compatibility between the native page-layout formats is not nearly as comprehensive as between the image editing programs. So you’ll have to convince people step by step, and suggesting currently-unusable alternatives is not too convincing, I’m afraid.

Hi Mark, thanks again for your efforts! Lots more helpful than what I’m used to elsewhere in the design-software business… Anyway to me it seems to boil down to a compatibility issue: Using the setting exactly as you showed in your latest post, I drew two new files – the left, red one on a white canvas (then exporting to transparent), and the blue one on a transparent canvas. Placing into Indesign 2020 as well as 21 shows unwanted effects though: the red one has a dirty, shadowy background, while the blue one, even though looking good in preview.app, imports to a non-transparent rendering in the layout document. And worst about it is that neither can be manipulated colour-wise in Indesign. Well, for these cases I still have the external converter option, so not too bad. (With Screenprinting it’s different, but a lot has been said about that in this thread. Need to fall back to my old PS CS6 there.) But I liked the way you handled this, a lot. Sincerely hope to be able one day to use the full Affinity Suite in professional, distributed contexts.

Hi Mark, thanks again. I’m getting closer with PNG but am not quite there. With the presets from your screenshot (8bit, grayscale palette, transparent background), the resulting PNG is flat black, no transparency. (#3 in my screenshot.) Setting the background, in the PNG presets, to white results in a usable image, though without the option to edit fill colour. (#2.) The desired effect is almost there when I export with white background and 1bit depth, here I can apply fill. The result is quite dirty though, see all those blemishes where in the original file there’s all transparency, plus of course you lose all the nuances of 8bit. The point is with the BMP format you can use plain 1bit logo artworks as well as tone-rich 8bit grayscale images and colour them in the layout to your liking, using spot or process colours in any tint desired, and it’s always neat and clean. Granted, there’s still a workaround using XnConvert but it’s kind of unsatisfying, I think.

Of course I did. But please have a look at the attached screenshot: These different-coloured images are all the very same BMP file, also attached (it’s pure black when opened in an image editor – but for the layout program it’s just pixels vs. transparent, I’m free to define the colour there). And when I save this as a PNG, it will always load as black into Indesign, no chance to modify the colour there. (Edit: try placing any image format into a layout document, then select the frame’s content. Then try editing the fill colour of the content. To my knowledge, this will always be greyed out – unless you place a BMP file.) At least I haven’t found which settings to use when saving as PNG to achieve the same effect. If it’s possible I’d be too glad to learn. Anyway, thanks for listening – I appreciate that! Ohne Titel_b.bmp

As I see this topic is still unsolved as of Nov. 2020, here’s another urgent vote pro BMP. This is not an application but a use case only accepting BMP: As far as I know it’s the only format allowing me to place the same graphic file multiple times into the same print layout (Indesign so far, on my side, because of clients’ needs) and assign different colours and tints to each of them – exactly the way I assign colour to a line of text. It can be a huge time-saver not having to create lots of different-coloured TIFFs when colour is the only factor that differs between them. – Or are there other, Affinity-supported file formats that would do the job? I currently don’t know any. Christian W. (Germany)