toltec

Oh yes, you are quite correct. I tried that before and for some reason I only got empty, unfulfilled styles. I must have been having a bad style day

You can NEVER set the screen colours to CMYK. Monitors use Red Green and Blue light and RGB light can display far more colours than CMYK can print Basically, the calibration device will only make your screen display accurate RGB colours. It’s the Soft proof layer that will make the Affinity RGB image look closer to CMYK. You can’t download an ICC profile for your screen. The calibrator has to actually “see” your screen. It’s like me saying your screen is too bright. How would I know ? . Any device should be fine, Spyder , Munki or X-rite. I have a Spyder, so can’t comment personally on the others. If you set the Pantone colours in Affinity, using the CMYK Pantone Swatches in the swatches panel, you will then be using the physical Pantone swatch to see what those colours will actually print like. The print colours will/should look like the physical swatch colours. It doesn’t matter what they look like on the screen so you don’t need a Soft proof layer for that. Just do it by numbers. Why would you want to turn it off? You are looking at the actual colours of the image, not some unrealistic overbright, too red distorted image. OK, maybe I have seen your monitor . You only use soft proof layers to visualise what RGB colours will look like when printed to CMYK. Normally, your calibrated monitor will just display accurate RGB colours and you won’t be using Soft proof layers when editing photographs, I hope

I don't there there is any way for a macro to work on that, sorry I don't know why you can't load some images, I can load almost anything. I attached a Photo file. bordering.afphoto

Personally. I think we should use PPI for printing, which is technically correct. Using 2 pixels as the ideal quantity to produce a "halftone dot", as in LPI. For screens, maybe, PQ for Pixel Quantity. But nobody ever listens, sigh!

I think the best way is to create it with an outer frame for the colour border, and an inner frame to mask the image. If you apply a Gaussian blur effect to the inner frame (now the mask), that blurs the picture edges. Put the picture on the page, then mask the rectangle to the image, by dragging it to the masking position, or putting the rectangle layer above the image, right click and choose Mask to Below. Apply a Gaussian blur to the Mask, not the image. I don't know what app you are using? but I have included a Designer file for you to see, but it is identical in Photo. The Designer file will load into Photo!. The good thing is, if you create this type of border you only ever need to do it once as you can easily replace the image inside, without having to create the frame every time. Just select it and click on Replace Image. and it replaces the image inside the border. fadeborder.afdesign

Damn, you’re fast

You can convert it into an editable pixel layer by right clicking and choosing Rasterise. You can’t turn it into a vector (autotracing) because that feature is not in Designer yet.

So PPI is not actually a precise or fixed measurement because the inches are only “virtual” and are are in fact of a variable length between about 1/2 of an inch and 10 inches. So the I of PPI means nothing. DPI is incorrect because actually, we don’t mean dots, in litho we actually mean lines per inch. i.e. 150 lines per inch. So the D of DPI means nothing. Then, in LPI, the L of lines is not correct because we simulate an old fashioned half tone screen with dots. i.e. 2540 imagesetter dots to create a 150 LPI halftone screen “dot”. This halftone “dot” varies in size because it is simulating shades of grey. So the L of LPI is no better than the “P” or the “D”. At least the inch is an inch (geographical variations excepted). However, because the imagesetter dots (physical dots) can’t vary in size, we use varying quantities of physical dot to simulate a varying size halftone dot which is simulating shades of grey. Even “halftone” is a bit daft because there is actually only one tone (black) or two if you count “no-tone”as white, with these two “tones” simulating an infinitive numbers of greys. Who came up with all this? Normally, I would blame Microsoft but I don’t think they were around in the 1800s when all this halftoning started.

You can't make a style but you can create a swatch. Do as @gdenby suggests, Use the fill tool to fill with the bitmap, then right click and choose Add to Swatches > From Fill. It will then appear in the Swatches panel. Here I turned three fills into a Fills palette. Edit. You can make a style, as @gdenbysays. For some reason I couldn’t first time I tried.

You can also use a gradient map adjustment. The Colour handle on the left needs to be White.

No. The Appli iPad ‘retina’ display has a very high resolution of 2048 by 1536 which works out at 264 ppi. Your 300 pixel image would occupy (1.136 ish) of an inch. A typical 24 inch HD monitor (1920 x 1080) has around 92 pixels per inch, so 300 pixels would occupy about 3.26 of an inch. A big screen 50 inch HD TV (also 1920 x 1080) has about 44 pixels per inch, on which your 300 pixels would measure 6.8 inches. So, based on a 300 pixels per inch image, an inch could be anything from just over one inch, to just under seven inches.

I have got through loads of PCs over the years, each one a bit faster but never really noticed much improvement. Usually because Microsoft strangles it with the latest OS. The only time I noticed a “huge” jump in performance was when I moved to an SSD drive. Windows and Photo both load in a few seconds, everything is much faster.

Yes but the monitors are physical objects, and it would be reasonable to assume that an inch on a monitor that is described as an inch, with 72 or 96 pixels or whatever pixels in it is actually a physical inch. At least that is my real world assessment.

Right. It's the only time inches actually are inches.

What is the point of using inches if they are not actually inches? If a taxi driver charged by the mile, is it OK if the miles actually vary in length if he’s having a quiet day? Remember that outside of America, inches were either discarded decades ago, or never used. So why must everybody use them when they have no value, or no fixed size? At least when it comes to monitor displays/pixels.

I agree totally, the problem is that new users (new to photo imaging or printing) have so many difficulties because of the DPI and PPI settings. I think using inches (especially in Europe where we discarded them decades ago) is confusing. Especially when an inch (on a monitor/phone is never an inch. Surely there’s a better way to explain this for new users?

You're a glass half empty sort of guy, aren't you

OK, if you have an image that is created for a device using 300 pixels per 'inch' how many inches will it be on the various device screens? So what is the point of the 'inch' if you can't rely on it being an inch? This is what I see confusing new (and some old) users time and time again. The only thing that matters is pixel quantity. This controls display size, depending on the device resolution or print quality. Designing in pixels per inch is more relevant to printing than DPI. My imagesetter printed at 2540 dots per inch, each dot being one blast from the laser. This size could not vary. But the halftones were 150 lines per inch. Because the size of the LPI dots needs to vary to simulate grey, the smaller 2540 dot has to vary in quantity, not size. (see images) Also, the LPI dots never falls in exactly the right place (like pixels on a monitor) but the laser can't antialias, so again it comes down to dot quantity. So,. to make up a 150 lpi 'dot' at different levels of grey, varying quantities of 2540 dots are used. See my very quick and crude image of 2540 dots per inch making a 150 lpi dot. A 150 lpi 'dot' made from 2540 laser dots. Making a smaller halttone lpi 'dot'. Actually, the number of 'greys' that can be simulated by this method is limited by the LPI chosen. For example, you cannot produce 256 level of grey with too high a screen ruling, like 400 lpi. The 2540 dots are just too big. So actually, PPI is best suited for the page than anything else. Your 300 Pixels Per Inch image will control a 2540 dots per inch device. I think that works out as about 8.5 dots per pixel? Of course, that gets far more complicated with colour.

Unfortunately, you can’t upload images until you have made a few posts, which is a bit annoying for a newbie with a problem. I guess it’s a sort of security thing. Try making a couple of posts and then try uploading again. If you are using Photo? I would suggest loading each photo into the Develop Persona. There is a white balance tool that works quite well if you have something that is neutral grey or white in the image. Just click on it, or click on several areas for an ‘average’ reading and Photo sets that grey (or white) to neutral. Officially, it should be white, but I found it works OK on neutral greys, with a bit of tweaking. The advantage of that is that you can save the adjustment settings as a ‘preset’. Then even if the other pictures don’t contain a neutral colour, the preset will apply the same correction settings to each one. You might have to do a bit of final tweaking, but you should be close! Unfortunately, if the white balance inside the camera kept getting it completely wrong and there is a lot of variation, presets won’t work. In conditions like that, best to turn the camera auto white balance off, take a few pictures of something white, then use that photo as a reference for the rest.

If your image is going to be two inches x two inches on the design and the printed page, it needs to be 600 x 600 pixels. If four inches by four inches, 1200 x 1200 pixels. 300 pixels per inch which equates to dots per inch for your purpose. IMO, PPI is a stupid measurement, at least for screens. A 27 inch monitor has got the same number of pixels in the 1920 width as a lowly 1920 x 1080 phone. So how many inches are 1920 pixels? On my monitor 1920 pixels is about 24” on my phone about 5”. That’s quite a big difference in the length of an inch if you use PPI as a measurement.

Forget RGB, you are not calibrating for RGB as both your printers print use CMYK inks. Only monitors use RGB, which is the problem between display and print that affects everyone. The problem is, one printer uses a CMYK workflow, one uses an RGB workflow, which makes things a bit more complicated for you. At the end of the day, your file has to end up as CMYK because that is what printing inks are. So, it must either be designed in CMYK or converted from RGB to CMYK. If you design in CMYK you are doing the conversion, if you design in RGB the printer is doing it. Because the results will vary due to the different workflows, you will need to compensate for that. That is where Affinity’s Soft Proofing layers come in handy. You only need to calibrate your screen once!!! You are just making sure you get a constant and accurate display. Monitors vary a lot, especially laptops (for the reasons I mentioned above) so you need an accurate reference. That won’t help much with matching the printing (especially in your case due to the the different materials) but soft proofing layers will. Think of Soft Proofing layers as a ‘temporary monitor adjustment’ layer. They are not designed to alter the image permanently, only to alter your monitor display so it more accurately matches the print output. See ? You can create as many ‘temporary adjustment layers’ as you like, matching each type of material you print on (or the different RGB/CMYK processes). Just remember to remove the layers from the image before you send the file to the printer or your ‘temporary adjustment layer’ will become permanent and you will get several thousand incorrectly coloured tee-shirts I would still buy a Pantone process colour swatch. It really helps to see what colours can actually be produced with CMYK inks. Many colours you see, especially on screen, just can’t be printed. So better to pick colours that can, or you will never be able to reproduce them as you would like. And if you design in CMYK it will help.

Wow, if their printing is that bad, anything within 29mm of the margins could be trimmed off I would be interested to know why though. I was in the print trade for 30 years and never came across that much bleed. Odd! Sorry, didn’t think about the Artboard thing but at least you know about the Clip to Canvas option

Two points. 3cm bleed is far too much, that would cause problems for the printer by obscuring any registration marks. Set to 3mm You can see what is in the bleed area by going View > View Mode > Clip to Canvas and unticking it. That would have shown your problem. An object with 3mm bleed showing outside the page boundaries, Clip to Canvas off 3mm bleed, but Clip to Canvas on

If you select the view tool (the hand) you can change document units on the context menu. BTW You can still enter 118mm in the Transform panel, even if the document is set to pixels. Photo will ‘translate’ it.

I use it to lay out pages, so it is to me. I paid for it, I can use it for what I want