Medical Officer Bones

No worries, I misunderstood your original question as well. As a matter of fact, I never ever scale down my images in Publisher (or any Affinity product or even Photoshop) and always scale down at the exact required size in other tools that do support better down-scaling algorithms (such as Catmull-Rom). One more thing to consider is the effect of sub-pixel positioning in design software: if the artwork is placed on a sub-pixel position, when rasterizing it may result in a very soft looking conversion. In some software this may play a negative role. I know it does in Affinity Photo, but I am unsure about Publisher. Have not tested it.

No, unfortunately not. When Publisher down-scales the image, it is applying a different (destructive) resampling algorithm (Bilinear) compared to what the screen display is doing for quick previewing. Then, after scaling down, the image is a different image, and the screen rendering will base its new display version on that rasterized version (which is a 1 on 1 pixel preview). Hence the shifting of pixels. Pixel preview presents an approximation of the much higher resolution unrasterized version, unlike the second rasterized version, which is not a preview but displaying the actual pixels. The approximation of the original at 100% and the final rasterized version are not the same, and use different algorithms. The result is a different than expected result at 100%.

PS I work on a 2560x1440 screen on Windows with Publisher. I can't really tell the difference visually between both versions at 100% zoom. But obviously I do when zooming in more.

I would expect pixels to blow up by three times: 900/300 = factor 3. At native monitor pixel resolution (CTRL-9) I can barely make out some pixels shifting because of this. When I zoom in 400% the two versions compared the rasterized version looks much fuzzier.

I tested this with a dummy 900ppi 4500x4000px image (with geometric shapes, both aliased and anti-aliased to check what happens after rasterization) in Publisher. At that resolution, the effective resolution of 900ppi is too much for print, so that is the reason you (and I as well) would rasterize it in order to get the required exact 300ppi resolution, correct? Yes, when I rasterize that 900ppi image in Publisher it becomes an effective 300ppi. And it is down-scaled to ~1077x767px. At that lower resolution the image looks much fuzzier, of course. When images are placed in Publisher it does not show a pixel preview, but rather displays the images at the actual resolution: which means the 900PPI image is not displayed at the document's 300ppi, but at a higher resolution. When it is rasterized to the document's 300ppi it is converted to a much lower resolution version, which is fuzzy looking compared to the original.

What bit depth does the 900ppi image have? Is it a monochrome bitmap, or greyscale/colour?

If this is implemented, those layer properties must also include an anti-aliasing on/off option. I've worked with many image editors, and the only one I am aware of that offers this level of control on a per-layer basis is PhotoLine. Would be nice to have in Affinity as well. @Steps Psenda's suggestion is not as crazy as it sounds. Pure black and white (monochrome) images, for example, should be printed at 800~1200dpi, so a document could consist of layers with varying resolutions. Unfortunately none of the Affinity products support monochrome bitmaps at this point. Another reason why a layer setting for PPI would be handy is when a lower resolution image is imported at (for example) 72ppi (based on its PPI parameter) and by quickly changing the PPI layer setting to 300ppi its size is automatically set to the exact resolution required for 300dpi print. Some layout and image editing applications actually have this an an option for objects to simplify the workflow.

DPI (or rather PPI in this case) means nothing when working on the screen, and will only be interpreted when an image is printed. We need to know the exact pixel resolution you are working in. What are the respective pixel resolutions of both images?

Just realized a simple vector rectangle overlaid and set to Lighten blend mode will do the trick non-destructively as well.

I am unsure whether a "Convert to Rasterized" live filter layer is really the answer here. When I compare to Photoshop and PhotoLine, both applications allow for external files to be loaded and both have the option to create quick selections based on colour from those imported PDF files. Photoshop uses smart object to achieve this, while PhotoLine creates an external linked file layer by dragging in a file with ALT. When the original file is updated, both apps update the imported file. I think in this type of architectural colouring work, PhotoLine has the advantage over both Photoshop and Affinity Photo with its effective texture control widget, and simple selection to filled vector layer options. The new beta includes an option to fill selections with a vector layer instead of just the standard bitmap fill as well. To improve Affinity Photo for this kind of work, I think a similar external file smart object workflow should be introduced, as well as the option to use the automatic selection tools with these imported external layers, just like Photoshop and PhotoLine.

Layer Effects --> Color Overlay --> Lighten Blend Mode, pick a colour. *edit* Oops, you already mentioned the same method.

I am a long-time Krita user. For digital painting I find it a joy to use, and arguably superior to generalist applications like Photoshop. I would not do heavy lifting compositing work in it, though: its focus is directed at digital painting and drawing, and it excels at that. Krita is superb when used in combination with a good compositing app, such as Photoshop, Affinity Photo, or PhotoLine. The animation tools are good for FBF (Frame By Frame) animation. Don't expect automatic in-betweening, although the developers have introduced a graph editor for inbetweening transparency effects, and are working on extending the animation capabilities further. The onion-skinning is fine, and for FBF work it's quite nice to work in Krita. But work on shorter sequences, and import those into OpenToonz for further editing and compositing. (OpenToonz is a professional level open source animation application.) The vector tools are limited, and suffice for simple things. The text tools is... quite bad. The devs are aware of this, and will improve the usability of the text tool. The layer stack is more flexible and feature rich than Affinity, but the overall compositing and filter performance is not up to par compared. Drawing and painting are very fast though, even with giant brushes (if you have reasonable hardware). I have no issues working at 600ppi A4 and 16bits. All in all, a great companion to Affinity for digital painting and drawing.

Will your comic include sharp inked line art? If so, Affinity may not be the answer.

It doesn't work like that: saving a bitmap as a EPS will not auto-magically convert it to a vector file. Instead, you must use a bitmap to vector conversion tool to do this first, and then save as an eps, svg (or any other vector compatible file format). Unfortunately, none of the Affinity products currently have this functionality built-in (as of yet). The good news is that a copy of the open source Inkscape does offer this feature, and is easy to use. Here's a quick tutorial: https://goinkscape.com/how-to-vectorize-in-inkscape/ After "vectorizing" an image, save as SVG, and import in Designer for further editing.

Photo is great for general image and photo editing, even quite good for digital painting, but (sorry) rather inept for pixel art and 'old-school' game sprites and tile maps. It completely lacks an indexed colour mode, although one could argue that Photoshop's indexed mode is quite limited as well (no layers, etc.). Indexed remappable colour palettes are not possible either. In other threads a fairly large number of other issues are pointed out, such as no real aliased workflow options (the coverage map is a shoddy workaround), no 1bit bitmap support, no frame-based animation, no true pixel snapping, no single-pixel drawing mode, no dithering control, ... It just isn't meant for this kind of work, and the workflow very, very akward. Again, Photo is otherwise really good. Perhaps it will be improved in a future update, but I personally can't tolerate doing any pixel art in Photo in its current state. Btw, Paintshop Pro is NOT the spiritual successor to Deluxe Paint (which I used to work in during Amiga times and produced game assets with at the time): the REAL spiritual successor is Pro Motion. Pro Motion NG even works with brushes just like Deluxe Paint did :-) Pro Motion NG is completely focused on pixel art and old-school graphics. You can even define old non-square 2-1 pixel ratios to work with (like the Commodore 64 or Amstrad multi-colour 160x200px modes). Full support for indexed colour palettes, with limits and remapping. And sprite animation as well as tilemapping. In short, Pro Motion is the perfect combo with Photo. They complement each-other perfectly well, each having strengths where the other one is missing things. In my opinion nothing comes close to PM for pixel work. It's like Photoshop for pixel artists (and viewed like that in the game industry). https://www.cosmigo.com/

Before you'll be able to pull off stuff like that it will take at least one year of intense learning and experience, if not more. Especially if you've never done anything related to 3d work before and have to learn the terminology. Creating good looking 3d art from scratch is hard to learn. (but super fun!)

Yes. Free, open source, and the latest version (2.8) has real-time quality rendering. On par with commercial 3d apps. Ahead of the curve compare to some in most respects (such as Lightwave). And 2.8's GUI has seen remarkable progress, and is now arguably 'easier' than even some of the commercial offerings. In short, no need to spend any money if you want to add a bit of 3d spice in your work! (But please do consider sponsoring the Blender Foundation for their hard work :-)

Something as simple as that example takes at most 20 minutes to do in Blender. I'll see if I can whip up a quick example. Lunch first, though! :-)

Ah, I see you are into textile printing! Yes, that would be problematic. I checked out your example file. My solution to your problem is to export to a PDF, and open it in PhotoLine. Then turn off global anti-aliasing. Done. Export to a bitmap. The only issue is the pattern at the bottom. Affinity does not support vector patterns yet, so you would have to replace that pattern in PhotoLine with a pattern that consists of vector layers which must be set to aliased in the layer properties (PhotoLine allows for easy per-layer anti-aliasing control and for aliased vector patterns the layers themselves must be set to aliased before the pattern is defined.).

@Bones_the_Bones The simple answer is "No". Unfortunately none of the Affinity products feature a global option to turn anti-aliasing on or off. Other software often does, and with a simple switch anti-aliasing is removed (both on-screen while working, as well as during output): Ideally Affinity would allow the user to turn off anti-aliasing globally on the fly while working, but the only option available to sort-of work around this missing option is to set a custom coverage map like so: But there are still several issues with this approach: for one, it must be applied to each and every layer individually, which is a workflow breaker and very inconvenient to keep track of, and secondly, this approach will break under circumstances. For example, the star object does have the coverage map set correctly, but still is anti-aliased in places. The reason: the stroke setting is set to an outside stroke, which breaks that work around method. Worse, when the circle's stroke is set to "align to inside", the yellow bleeds into areas outside the stroke! I use custom stroke alignment all the time to achieve certain effects, and this coverage map is incompatible with that workflow. Others have already mentioned in other threads that this is really problematic for work like pixel art or textile printing. There are other issues with this coverage map approach and the way strokes work in Affinity: Left is Affinity with the thinnest possible stroke applied and the coverage map method. Right is illustration software with global anti-aliasing turned off, and a 1px stroke. I probably don't have to explain the issue here: right is what we want, but left is what we get in Affinity. In short: far from an ideal situation. I do hope the Affinity devs will fix this in an upcoming release, because for any aliased artwork Affinity is in a really bad place as it stands and the workflow is just not there in my opinion. My suggestion would be to look elsewhere if this is important for your work.

@Fixx I agree: InDesign is very quick to work with. @NauticalMile I must have misunderstood you in some way: zooming and panning documents in all Affinity products is very fast: just use a mouse with middle mouse button and scroll wheel. Much more effective than any buttons. I am always frustrated with Adobe products than none of those allow panning the view with the middle mouse button, and force the user to press and hold down the space bar, which is very inefficient. Also, I use keyboard shortcuts for most commonly and often used commands in any software, which thoroughly speeds up workflow in any application. Much faster than any GUI. CTRL-S (win) or COMMAND-S (mac): save done. Faster than moving the mouse to a save button, and it works in any application with a save function. A save button just takes up unnecessary space and clutters the view in my opinion. Same for undoing things: ctrl-Z, done. Having said this, I do agree with both you and @Fixx that Affinity Publisher and Photo in particular have a number of basic workflow issues at this point. These do indeed stunt the workflow, and I hope the kinks will be ironed out by version 2. I mean, I recall the first couple of versions of InDesign, which had some very rough edges as well. As it is said: Rome wasn't built in a day.

Did you try to enter your serial number on the page I linked to? If the number includes the letter OEM it will not work, but otherwise it should. I have read several accounts of users with OEM 32bit WIN7 machines succesfully installing the 64bit version with their OEM serial, though. You will need a genuine Windows 7 pro 64bit ISO image, which can be downloaded with this tool: https://www.heidoc.net/joomla/technology-science/microsoft/67-microsoft-windows-iso-download-tool Then choose the correct Windows 7 OEM 64bit version that mirrors your 32bit version, and backup your machine. Clean your hard drive, and reinstall WIndows with this new version and when asked enter your serial number. It will work, because a product key works for either the 32-bit or 64-bit version. Just make sure to uninstall the 32bit version completely, because you are only allowed to run one version with one product key.

If you have a Window 7 PRO 32bit product key, you should be able to download the ISO image for the 64bit version, and install that version instead at no extra cost. Problem solved: Affinity will run. Your 32bit Illustrator will run as well. https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows7 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_install/is-a-windows-7-license-key-valid-for-both-32-bit/70d546cd-b6e3-44d8-a6c8-fd7feb7d1915

In competing page layout software it is possible to right-mouse click an image (vector or bitmap) and open that asset in an external editor of the user's choice. InDesign, for example, offers this option, and I often make use of it. I looked and looked, and it seems Publisher lacks this rather basic functionality. I understand that Photo will become part of Publisher as a Persona, but that still will not solve this issue, since not everyone will be interested in purchasing Photo and/or Designer, and may prefer to edit their assets in other software. My request would be then: please add a simple "Edit With..." option to allow Publisher users to open any asset in any custom editor of their own choice.

It serves up most of the Internet? It runs every Android based phone and hardware, dominating the the smart phone market? It runs Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. It drives a huge amount of hardware (including those large Tesla car displays, Kindles, Kobos, drones, and much more) and most of the internet of things (fridges, thermostats, etcetera)? Heck, it's the only OS running on the entire planet Mars (Mars Rover) and it runs the systems on ISS. It runs China's Social Credit System, controlling many aspects of their population's lives from 2020 onward. Self-driving cars will be running on Linux when they hit the main consumer market. Linux dominates in the world throughout, with the exception of graphic design and production and a number of other minor areas such as consumer and office desktops/notebooks where mainly Windows and some Macs are in use. Macs and iOS serve as terminals through which consumers connect to a by and large Linux world with a measure of Windows. Otherwise it is Linux, Linux, Linux. A lot of embedded Linux too. Linux will probably drive all the upcoming technology and artificial intelligence that will replace much manual labour and related jobs: on farms, in shopping (already happening with all those automated check-outs), in transportation at large (including automated transport ships, planes and drones), sex bots, the servicing and support industry (chatbots), and so on, and so forth. Most office jobs will disappear, replaced by AIs running on some kind of Linux derived OS and software. Linux drives by far most of the IT world as we know it. And it will only become MORE. Linux will replace most humans' low level jobs, probably - it's already happening. Big brother runs and loves Linux. Linux: welcome to humankind's future. And the future is now. Or perhaps your question's scope is to be limited to the prepress print industry only and partly to print graphic design? Well, disregard the previous lines of text in that case. [Written with a hefty dose of sarcasm and irony. Or is it?]