FromTheDeep

Thanks for checking @Hangman!

Thanks guys, in response to your post @Hangman, it is reassuring to see that level of colour consistency across all those different apps. I'm assuming this test would show the same results if the logos PDF was exported from Publisher, as this is the app I seem to have the most trouble with when exporting to PDF (it could just be Reader causing the trouble though). Interesting to see that Reader seems to be displaying colours correctly for you, this has definitely not been the case for me, although I do have Acrobat Pro installed simultaneously, which may be causing the issue. I'm going to uninstall reader for the time being, given the uncertainty surrounding it's colour reproduction capabilities, and probably invest in Adobe Acrobat Pro 2020 as recommended by @lacerto. I'll not worry about achieving correct colours in Reader, as I feel it's not really worth the hassle given all the other ways clients may be viewing my PDFs these days . @lacerto I don't have ultimate control over how clients view the PDFs - I think I'd rather give them the flexibility to view them in the apps they're comfortable with. Many thanks to you both!

Hi @Hangman and @lacerto, thank you both so much for the considerable amount of time and effort you've put in to help me out here. @lacerto your video is fantastic thank you, I can see how Adobe Acrobat has an extra level of colour management that allows for the colour to be produced as desired. While I've been a graphic designer for quite a few years now, my knowledge of colour management is limited. To be honest, I'm half-understanding your responses, but still a bit unsure about a couple of things. If you or anyone else has the time, here are some questions I'd love to clarify: Question 1 This question is to do with Affinity's ability to create PDF files with consistent viewing experiences. This is important for me as I'd like to distribute resources to clients and have my brand colour palette maintain a fairly consistent appearance on their devices/apps. (P.S. I understand that complete consistency isn't realistic as there is a wide range of different devices and technologies in use in today's day and age). Is it possible to have Affinity Publisher (and Affinity Designer for that matter) export a digital PDF with an embedded sRGB profile, and feel confident that it will display in the most common PDF reader/viewing apps with colour fairly congruous with the colours I'm seeing in my working Affinity Publisher file, given that I'm working in an sRGB colour profile also, assuming that these PDF reader/viewing apps have colour settings left at their defaults? If I'm understanding correctly, would it be safe to say that someone viewing the PDF in Google Chrome, or in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC with colour management left at default settings (the default RGB profile for Acrobat Pro DC is sRGB, right?), would see colours consistent with my working Publisher file (set at sRGB also). And in addition, if someone had adjusted their preferences in Acrobat Pro, and selected Adobe RGB as their RGB colour space, their colours wouldn't be consistent with my working Publisher file, even though I'd embedded the sRGB colour profile on export? So far it doesn't seem as though embedding the colour profile makes any difference to the outcome in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. My version of Acrobat Pro takes notice of whichever colour space is selected in its colour management settings, and if this is anything but sRGB, colours are displayed incorrectly. And it looks as though Reader is a lost cause, so I won't worry about colour consistency within that app. Question 2 If the answer to Question 1 is yes, are there any specific steps I need to take on my end (other than to embed the colour profile on export to PDF) to ensure the most consistent experience for clients viewing the PDF on their devices? Question 3 There seems to be a lot of different version of Adobe Acrobat/Reader floating around, and it can be difficult to know which one to go with. I recently swapped to reader believing it had enough features for me, but finding out about this bug, I think I'll need to try something else. Do you recommend Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, or is there another app you think is better? For context, I'm coming from many years using Adobe's apps, where I didn't seem to run into these hurdles as much with PDF exports, somehow. I'm loving the Affinity alternatives, but seem to be getting a bit hung up when it comes to PDF exports - I feel as though something is a bit different in the export process regarding handling of colour, where colours seem to be more hit and miss whether they resemble the working file, but not exactly sure what. Thanks again for any help - I hope this is a helpful discussion for others too!

Hi @Hangman, after looking into this a little further, and doing some further experimentation, I've found there seems to be a problem with Adobe Reader's colour management (or lack thereof). There are lots of reports about this online, with no conclusive response from Adobe unfortunately. I then experimented with Adobe Acrobat (the paid version of Reader) and embedding colour profiles using Affinity Publisher into the PDF, which raised another question in my mind. This is just purely speculation, but I'm a little unsure whether Affinity Publisher is fully able to embed colour profiles in a way that Adobe Acrobat responds to - as in, Acrobat seems to just render the document with the colour profile set in it's colour preferences rather than the profile embedded in the PDF? At least, this seems to be what's happening on my end. Full disclosure – I can't remember if this used to happen when I was using inDesign. Do you know if this is expected behaviour? I was able to get Adobe Acrobat to display correct colours by setting colour management settings within its Preferences to be consistent with my working profiles in the Affinity programs. However, I doubt my clients will have the same colour management settings as mine in their versions of Acrobat, so does this mean my logo will be displaying colours in a completely 'unmanaged' way across different clients' devices. I'm just a bit concerned about this from a branding perspective. Thanks again for baring with me

Really appreciate the help @Hangman. Yes I have in the past, I’ll look into this more tomorrow as it’s getting late here but thanks a lot for pointing me on the right track. I’ll see about taking this topic off the bug listings. Enjoy the rest of your day and thanks again

Hi @Hangman, thanks for the quick reply. Looks like I might need to do some heavy troubleshooting of my Adobe Acrobat installation, seeing as you weren't able to recreate this behaviour on your end. Thanks so much for your help with this, I'd be glad to make a donation to you online if you offer that I did try the Embed Profiles checkbox too, and no luck. And yes, Apple's preview app shows no colour issue as mentioned above. Any ideas on how I might be able to reset Adobe Acrobat Reader to a factory default state? There seems to be a lack of support online in this area. Thanks again, Chris

Hi there, Not sure if this is a bug or something going haywire on my end, but I was working on a document in Affinity Publisher, with my logo placed as a linked AD file within the document, and could not manage to export the document to a [Digital PDF – High Quality] and have my logo maintain accurate colour in the resulting PDF (it became highly saturated each time). I've checked and both the AD logo document and the Publisher document are using the same colour profile (sRGB), and all colour settings as far as I can tell are exactly the same, so I can't see where any strange conversions might be occurring. To investigate, I tried just creating a simple red square in AD (I chose the iPad mini document preset), then creating a new AP document (also with iPad mini document preset), I placed the red square from AD into the AP file, tried to export to [Digital PDF - High Quality] and the same over-saturated colour resulted. Could it be that my version of Acrobat (which I'm using to view the PDF files) has a strange setting stored somewhere, or is there a bug with the Affinity apps? By the way, the PDF colour displays completely as desired (no increased saturation) in Apple's Preview app. If anyone could try to recreate this I'd be really grateful. I've already tried uninstalling Acrobat, wiping all the files from my system, and reinstalling to no avail. I've attached my test PDF, AD and AP files for reference. Cheers, Chris test-square.afdesign test-square_ap.afpub square_test_export.pdf

Hi guys, frame text, and Old Bruce does that work for you? I haven’t found the transform panel to work to scale text proportionately. The only way I’ve found to do it is click and drag that bottom right handle, but that only gives one direction to scale in.

Hi, just wondering if there is any way to proportionally scale text boxes and text within all at once to say, the bottom left? If not, it would be a nice thing to have. Thanks

+1 for this!

Hi Dan, Thanks for your reply. For easier troubleshooting, I've set up a Test AD doc with a Test images folder sitting alongside it, with two images inside. Yes the AD doc was created on desktop and the link was initially created to the iCloud destinations - linked images are located in the 'Images' folder that sits alongside the doc file on my iCloud Drive. I've attached a screenshot taken on iPad after selecting 'Yes' in the missing resources dialogue. For me, it shows just the file name "massage-therapist_1.jpg" without the rest of the file path. I then have to specifically select the right image, and once done, it takes me back into this dialogue once again to tell it where the next image is, and so on and so forth. For reference, I just updated to AD version 1.10.5 on iPad and my AD desktop version is 1.10.1. I'm running Mac OS Catalina 10.15.7. Also for reference, here's what the file path to this particular image looks like in my AD desktop resource manager: com~apple~CloudDocs/Test/Test Images/massage-therapist_1.jpg. Thanks again

Hi Wosven, Thanks for the quick reply. I'm not sure how to access the Resource Manager in iOS, is there a trick to finding it? I've been able to tap "Yes" when the missing resources dialogue comes up on iOS, which opens the browse dialogue, where it only shows the end part of the file location (the file name itself). Thanks again

When I try to swap from desktop to iPad whilst working on the one AD file (saved to iCloud), all resource links are missing upon opening the file on iPad (despite none of their locations being changed since the last save on desktop), and I am forced to relink them one by one. This happens every time, so my current workaround is to embed all linked images resulting in a huge file size. Am I missing something here?

Just an add on to this discussion, after working on some marketing materials for a client, I found that in-app colour conversion (RGB to CMYK for instance) works best on pixel layers with zero transparency. Any amount of transparency or using a layer that is listed as "Image" or "Shape" results in less desirable results with much wider colour shifts. I learnt this the hard way, having to manually go through and convert all layers to pixel and remove all transparency, and then make the conversion from RGB to CMYK for print, which gave me results comparable to RGB > CMYK colour conversion in Adobe Software. I'm not talking about PDF here, just focusing on in-software colour conversion. Definitely worth having a look at how Affinity handles colour conversion in relation to transparency, and layer types that are not pixel. There are some weird inconsistencies that are not present in Adobe, and this is something that will really take Affinity to the next level.

Hi Gabe, Thanks for that much appreciated! Just as a P.S., are you able to give me any advice from a colour management point of view for this use case (i.e. delivering PDFs to clients)? My design training was definitely more theoretically-focused, and I've had to figure out the technical stuff as I go. Cheers

Hi Gabe, Thanks for the reply. Yes you're right, thanks for mentioning that, however what ideally I'd like to be able to do is to not have to take this step to have the colours display in the correct profile that was set on PDF export. This is because my clients who are receiving my PDFs won't know how to simulate a profile like that. Coming from Adobe inDesign, my workflow for creating PDFs not intended for viewing online (for online I would work in sRGB) was as follows: Open a new document and set colour profile to Adobe RGB to avoid unnecessary colour gamut limitations > Set Transparency Blend Space to RGB > Work on document until complete > Export to PDF with Adobe RGB profile embedded in PDF > PDF would display exactly the same colours as the inDesign doc I was working on, without exception > Curse Adobe for being so expensive > Go to bed. Now in Affinity Publisher, I tried to use the same workflow, but noticed that any time a page contained transparent objects, the colours on that page in the resulting PDF would not reflect the colours of the Publisher doc I'd been working on. Thomaso discovered that Affinity Publisher forces an sRGB transparency blend space on pages with transparent objects present which seems to be the culprit - I'm wondering if from your perspective it would be better to have the transparency blend space of the entire document just match the document colour space by default - I think this is the way inDesign works, which is why I've never had any colour changes on any inDesign PDFs with transparent objects present. The PDF matches the doc I've been working on every time, with or without transparent objects present. I use a "graceful degradation" philosophy like in web design, where I work with as little limitations on colour as possible in the development and concepting phase, and convert down to more limited gamuts as required depending on the end use case. I would think this would be a pretty common approach for designers these days. With the way Publisher is currently set up, every time I use transparency in my Publisher doc, I actually have to select all objects involved, export them and open in Affinity Photo, Merge them (removing the transparency), then save and place back into Publisher, deleting the original transparent objects. This means I lose the ability to tweak and make changes to the transparent objects after the fact, because they have been merged together in Affinity Photo. It's super time-consuming, and pretty painful. Let me know what you think and if you need more clarification, and thanks for your time.

Hi thomaso, My use case is as follows: I'd like to be able to send some PDFs to paying clients for viewing on their screens. Some of the document's colours will be my brand colours, some of which will be outside the sRGB gamut. I also have some screenshots from a software program. I'm using a transparent yellow rectangle to highlight certain areas of the screenshots. At present, I can't export to PDF without having the pages with transparent rectangles be converted to the sRGB colour space, while the other pages remain in AdobeRGB. This is causing huge differences in colour from one page to the next, making my document look very unprofessional. I have what I want to be the same full-page background colour on every page, but it is currently changing dramatically on seemingly random pages (each time transparency is used). This is just one example of the issue. As you can see this is not an unusual use case - anyone who creates PDFs for presentations or for screen viewing would likely run into this at some point. I would image many other designers would run into the same issue, a very unexpected result, and become very frustrated with the software. It is easy to recreate the issue, and if you need more help doing so just let me know. But please, if there is no opportunity to get Serif to hear this issue, please let me know so I can save my time.

Thanks for your reply Thomaso. I can appreciate that for some users who only work in sRGB or CMYK, this is a non-issue, but for any designers who want wider rgb profiles in their documents and PDFs, this is verging on a deal-breaker. In comparison, Adobe inDesign exports PDFs with no such issue, and I’m seriously considering swapping back. With that being said, is there any way I can bring this to the developer’s attention? Regardless of whether this is a bug or a feature improvement, I’m confident it would be in their best interests.

Thanks Alfred and Walt for helping me out re: terminology. Thomaso you've described the bug perfectly, thanks. To summarise, when working with a Publisher doc that has an element on the page with any level of transparency, an sRGB colour profile seems to be automatically added to any elements interacting with the transparent element on export to PDF, causing all of their colours to be converted to the much more limited sRGB colour space. This happens regardless of what colour profile settings you set in the PDF export options. Importantly, it persists even if you specifically state you want the PDF to have the same colour space as the Publisher document. Assuming you like working with a much wider range of colours than sRGB (many of us I'm sure), and want to export PDFs for screen viewing and retain that wider gamut (pretty common!), this makes using Publisher with transparent objects a no-go. Thanks for the help in narrowing this down all, are we able to move forward and report this bug? Is there a typical timeline for these sorts of fixes?

Thanks for your replies guys! I'm not sure of the exact terminology, but to be as clear as possible, what I'm referring to is the simple act of reducing the value of the Opacity slider in the layers panel. If I give a shape any value other than 100 (no opacity), it affects the colours of the entire page. It appears to reduce all colours to fit within the bounds of the very limited sRGB colour profile, even though I'm using the wider Adobe RGB profile in the Publisher doc, and exporting to PDF with a colour space of Adobe RGB and document colour profiles embedded. thomaso you seem to have found the bug - an sRGB profile added to the document when there is an opaque shape present. Is this a bug within the software do you think? You mention it being subtle, but with certain Adobe RGB colours the unwanted conversion to sRGB is really extreme. I really need to be able to trust that when I go to export a digital PDF with some opacity present, the colours will be accurate. I've tried exporting to all of those different PDF presets you mentioned and all show inaccurate colours. I was also able to recreate the problem again today after a fresh boot, using a fresh Publisher doc, and uninstall Adobe Acrobat and removing all custom preferences. Any ideas welcomed and thanks again.

I have tested this on a range of colour profiles and in RGB/8 and RBG/16. Colours export fine to PDF without any opaque objects on the page, but as soon as I add a shape with even the slightest bit of opacity to the page, all colours get massively dulled in the PDF that is exported. Tried changing to a range of different PDF export settings, and made sure that colour space is set to use the Document Profile (Embed profiles is ticked too). "Flatten" is the only export preset that doesn't cause this issue, but I need to retain editability of the PDF. Sample 1.pdf shows a turquoise rectangle with no opacity (all colours are correct), Sample 2.pdfshows the results when I lower the opacity of the turquoise rectangle (dull). Please download PDFs and open in Adobe Acrobat to see the differences (colour differences don't show in browser). Using an iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) running Catalina 10.15.7 After switching from Adobe I'm loving AP and AD so far, please don't make me go back to Adobe! PLEASE I BEG YOU!!!