toltec

Well, I produced thousands of films for tee-shirt printers using an imagesetter, not once was the text rasterised first. Hence my surprise At most it might be converted to curves if the font was a bit odd, but never rasterised. That was the job of the RIP (the R as in Rasterise).

Why are you rasterising the text? Text automatically has a transparent background, as long as your document is set to be transparent. It will then remain at much better quality.

Well, is Microsoft not the publisher the vendor, the deliverer and the installer in this case? They put heavy installation restrictions on the software, Serif don't. If there is a problem with production quality, publishing, selling, delivery or installation, it is their responsibility. If you buy a camera from Amazon, you contact Amazon if it goes wrong, not China or Japan. Who Microsoft/Amazon buy or subcontract the product from is irrelevant (as far as you are concerned) as they took your money. If the product turns out to be at fault, it is up to the publisher to put it right (or refund you) and then make sure the manufacturer fixes the problem, or stop selling it. I'm am very sure Microsoft tested the software thoroughly before deciding to sell it as they will be well aware of consumer law. As I said before, Microsoft takes total control of the whole installation process from the moment you pay them. Microsoft is where the problem lies. If you fiddle around with anything to try and bypass that process, Microsoft will be able to deny any responsibility (they probably will anyway). But it's your choice.

I think I would experiment with using halftone dots or lines. Photo has a halftone screen filter. If it works, I would place the halftone shading on a layer behind the line art part of the bird (as below). The ‘halftone’ dots would then print as solid black dots, rather than as a halftone. It would mean a bit of trial and error as I don't know the capabilities of your printer. I have done similar things in the past but I had an imagesetter with a 2540 dpi hard dot resolution. This is a bit crude but it gives you an idea ? As I said it would need a fair bit of experimentation but it would open up some interesting possibilities ?

Well that would be the fault of the printer. As a former printer myself, I know these things However, if the book was full of spelling misteaks or inaccuracies, you could indeed blame the author. It would be her/his/their fault. As for big publishers vs vendors of software that depends on the licensing arrangements and I doubt either Apple or Microsoft are that flexible (especially with smaller companies). That’s the problem with supporting these huge companies, you/we create monsters who only care about money! I would always buy directly from Serif. In the case of Microsoft and Apple, (as far as I understand, I don’t actually know) they take control of selling and installing. I don’t think they even tell Serif who has bought the software. So in your case it is clearly an installation thing, therefore Microsoft 100 %. Microsoft take great about things like activation and licensing, hence all the restrictions. They want to maintain their sources of revenue, without piracy. If there was a bug in the actual program, then you could quite justifiably complain to Serif. They are pretty good at discussing these thing, finding a workaround and fixing them eventually.

That’s my point! If you blur the edges around the bird (the way Alfred or Wosven show) you are creating greys (which are halftones). How will you print them?

@BrianHermelijn In Preferences > Performance, try ticking Use precise clipping.

@iMac1943 My concern would be, does that sort of blurring work the way you make a screen? If you are printing to special chalk paper (I know nothing of the process) how does that translate into halftone dots for silk screening? You are designing and printing what is effectively a continuous tone grey for a process that uses big dots! (55 lpi ish).

Before you go any further, have you tried contacting Microsoft. I would be very cautious about messing around with a ‘controlled’ installation. You would certainly not get any support from them afterwards. In theory, you could roll back to a Windows restore point and start again. The licensing should work OK as you can install Photo on multiple computers, although it should re-install on the same pc without any hassle. It is Microsoft who sell Photo, Microsoft who install it (via the store) and Microsoft who restrict the access to it. Quite likely a Windows 10 update messed it up too. Serif are a bit like the writers of a book. You can’t really blame the author if you borrow a book from the library and the last page is missing

What shortcuts? What program ? What operating system ?

There is no crop to selection in Photo. Photo has a non destructive cropping approach, so it never actually discards the bit outside the crop area, unless you specifically tell it to. New software, new approaches. it is easy to do it though, make your marquee selection, Press Ctrl + C to copy, go, File > New from Clipboard. There is a horrendous shortcut Ctrl + Alt + Shift + N. However, if you change the shortcut to something like Alt + N you can do your cropping in a couple of presses, Ctrl + C then Alt + N. There are other ways too. Personally, I prefer the more modern non-destructive crop using the crop tool, just in case I screw up and want to add a bit back in. But there you go.

Serif aren’t American Anyway, what about South American companies? Quite a few of them in the Southern Hemisphere

Works for me ??? Just selected the layer and applied an outline fx As shown (rather overdone) in a tasteful shade of green

You could always save a Preset That will allow you to save the settings, or different variations of them to reuse on a different picture Make your adjustments then click on the burger menu to Add one,

The other thing you can do is convert the Circle (ellipse) into a pie You can then drag the red handle to make a half circle. Duplicate it (Ctrl + J) and flip one. It's as easy as pie

Why not start off a bit simpler, place the photo directly in Designer and use the Vector drop tool to crop it in place. Half the number of programs, half the learning curve. That’s my motto. There is a Place Tool on the Draw Persona Tools panel. Looks like a Photo (below the wine glass). Click on that and open your image from disc. If you drag with the pointer that appears, you can size the Image as you place it on the page. The crop Tool looks like, er, a crop tool, and is directly below the Place Tool. After you place the image, select the crop tool and crop away.

Designer has two types of Group layers, sort of. It’s a vector drawing program and layer control is more sophisticated. A standard group, and a ‘Container’ layer which is a sort of ‘super group’. That’s what you get if you click on the Add Layer button on the bottom of the Layers panel. Because Designer has a lot more control over groups and layers, I guess they didn’t want to confuse things and fill the panel up. The Edit All Layers button is related to layer/group control. Anyway, it’s easy enough to press control + G, right click on a layer and choose ‘group’ or use the menu Layer > Group.

When it comes to resizing the brush, if you press Alt, then both buttons and start to drag you can release the Alt key and the right mouse button. The brush will keep adjusting until you release the left button . I find that helps.

As I said, use Rotation. You can set the Rotation to any angle you want, such as 1.3 degrees. However, for what you want, you would probably be better to Clone onto a new layer. Then you can move the ‘cloned’ part independently to make it fit exactly. No need for trial and error to get the rotation angle exactly right. Create a new layer, Layer > New Layer which will create a blank, empty layer above the image. On the Clone Tool, Context Toolbar, set the Source to Layer Below. Now, Alt click on the image to set the Source and when you brush, you will be cloning onto the new, blank layer. You can select the Move Tool to move, rotate or stretch the cloned part exactly how you like. Leave the layer as it is or merge the two layers into one. Your choice. Repeat as many times as you need.

I used my tablet mainly for reading the manuals for the various software programs I use on the desktop.

If you adjust the 'Shape' of the brush, in More, 'Rotate' rotates the shape of the brush, as @h_dsaid. The Clone Brush (the stamp) will then paint in that shape, at that rotation. Above, one Clone brush rotated anti-clockwise, one clockwise, as per the More setting, below. If you use Rotation, on the Context Toolbar The image will be cloned at 90 degrees to the original. You can set scale or flip left to right or top to bottom too.

You should just be able to drag the nodes, as shown. This is Designer but it’s the same thing in Photo, the Node Tool is just in a different place. s

If you have a document open, go to the document menu (top left) and at the bottom click on ‘Assistant’. There is an “Adding Adjustment layer to selection” option in there.

I don’t know which app you are using? But they are pretty much the same. If you select the image, there should be handles all round. Click on the very top one (the one that sticks out) to rotate. You can also use the Transform Studio.

I think it's mostly about the tiny file size. This is as good as I would expect at that size. Just applied a small amount of Clarity.