BofG

You can get correctly scaled svg files out, it's a bit clunky but possible: You can't use any other units like mm though, but then that isn't really something to debug, just a lacking feature.

Indeed, but then this was almost two years ago and no word here from any staff. The OP went to a lot of trouble to give some great insight and feedback, but did it reach anyone in Serif?

White is not a concrete thing. It's relative (just compare a few different white things around you). There is a way to set up a file / print to preserve the white as defined in your working colour space, there are also ways to map the whitest colour in the file's colour space to the paper white. Somehow you are doing the first thing when printing your Affinity file, and the second thing when you print the jpeg (it's probably due to the export/import changing the colour space). Take a look at your colour settings for your affinity file, and then the settings for the jpeg and see if there's a difference there. I cannot view your file as I'm running an older version.

Your rendering intent can influence this - absolute colourimetric will preserve the "colour" of your white. Printing using perceptual or relative colourimetric should avoid this. If you are doing this to erase things, can you not actually erase the area to make it transparent?

All the same, there have been a few posts on here by users who have run into this issue and have not had the knowledge about the outer handles or the workaround, so it has had a negative impact on their workflow. I'd imagine there are more people coming across this than who would join and post here about it. To my view rushing to release is the wrong approach versus releasing good and stable code people can rely on. Different views I guess.

This particular bug was found during the beta phase, and released in the final code!! I'm not sure how it could get worse than that, so things from now can only get better

There's no benefit to using app manages colour, I'd steer clear of it as Affinity isn't great at it - and if your profile is CMYK it will "pretend" to use it but it will actually do a second conversion to RGB which messes the colours up.

The soft proof can only be as accurate as what is in the profile. If you are needing to make adjustments in the driver to match the screen that just means the print profile isn't completely accurate. Short of creating a custom profile, which I don't think you can do with the Spyder, then you will have to do as you are. Essentially what you are doing is compensating for the profile through your driver settings, there's nothing wrong with that if it's giving you consistent results.

Wise words. Without fail they break something important with each new release.

Ah, well that can get a lot more complicated The issue is that print uses CMYK inks, which gives a smaller range of colours, so there has to be some compromise. Best thing to do is find out from the printer what colour profile they need your document in and then apply that profile as a soft proof adjustment layer so you can see on screen a good approximation of the print output. You can then make adjustments against this. Exporting will then need to have that Layer turned off, and export according to the printer's requirements.

I don't know much about GIMP. If you export from Affinity and embed the document profile then it should look the same in all colour managed applications.

I'm pretty sure Windows photo viewer isn't properly colour managed. What if you open the jpeg in Affinity? Or even in a browser?

For the on screen colours, using the Spyder is a great first step. The one issue is your monitor covering sRGB means that there is likely some colours your printer can produce that your screen cannot (usually in the bright blue). The other thing to be mindful of is the brightness setting. For proofing this should be very low (80-120 cd/m2). You should re-profile if you have to drop your brightness a lot. To see what your print colours will be, you need to use a soft proof adjustment layer. This has to be at the top of the layer stack, and should be set to the profile for your paper (should be possible to find this online, it will be an ICC file). Do not use your monitor profile for anything, it's set in the OS when you create the profile. When printing, use "printer manages colour", and in the driver select the same paper profile as in the soft proof. Turn off this layer before printing.

I wish these things would get tested properly. Shame that good software is let down by this release-then-fix approach.

Not only that, but they released it with bugs that were reported from the beta. It's been pointed out many times that Windows store customers can't roll back, yet they still push the updates out with known issues

v2 .0 will be paid. But that's not likely to be the next release. v1.10 will be next, v1.11 after that and so on. Whether those feature will arrive is anyone's guess as Serif no longer share their feature roadmap.

Do you know what resolution they are printing at? Not the document resolution, the actual dpi of their printer.

You might be over thinking things, it will always look bad at >100% zoom. 300dpi will be fine for print, at the size you are printing at it wouldn't surprise me if the actual print resolution is lower than that. Did the print shop specifically ask for png? Seems unusual not to be asking for a pdf, especially if your artwork is vector based.

Exporting to pdf might be a better way, you should get a separate page per artboard. It was the same with v1.8. I got burned by that - app store purchase so no way to roll back. I've disabled updates, these releases are still in beta. There are even bugs that were reported and confirmed as logged with the developers during the beta that have been included in the release.

I think your only option is to use v1.9 for those files. If printing is the only issue, export to a different format and print in another application (maybe pdf?).

@erchdk I have and will continue to give them credit where it's due, I put time into helping on this forum where I can. What gets me though is they seem to forget that 1) some customers use their software as a key business tool 2) they also sell through the Mac/Windows stores where it's not possible to roll-back to an earlier version. When they opt to release the update knowing things are broken I feel it's letting their user base down.

This is one of those things I really don't understand, this bug was known to the developers and support staff prior to 1.9 being released, and yet it was still released with this bug present. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/131260-grouping-results-in-text-resize/

Well, not really but colour management has whole books written about it so the simple approach would be to see the colour settings in the files that turn out well for you and apply those same settings to the files that are not coming out well

It's exactly the same place as where you change it - the current format is shown when you go to that dialogue before you change the settings.

@Nina I thought the first photo of the mugs were the same design, but I didn't spot one had three people on the bench and the other two. Makes more sense now The "lauren and lucas" file is CMYK - SWOP (this is what appears to be the correct looking mug?) The "family" file is RGB/8 sRGB You need to go to file > document setup > colour then change colour format to match the one from the correct file (I think CMYK).