midsummer

Hi everyone,
 
I'm mostly a newbie to vector editing, so I hope someone can point me in the right direction.
 
I've created a black and white vector graphic using Affinity Designer. The graphic will be incorporated into a printed book, and the printer needs it as a 600dpi 1-bit black and white file — I think a vector format is preferred.
 
My document resolution is already 600dpi, so that's covered, but I'm struggling to work out how to use Affinity's export options to save out my graphic as 1-bit. Any ideas?
 
Thanks,
Gabi

Hello,
I can not find a Bitmap mode in 1-bit Photo Affinity off I need to process files that keeps strictly their mode and their resolution.
This is copydot files and it is important that it be treated as such.

It is provided a 1-bit Mode?

If that were the case , it might be interesting to have a true improvement over Photoshop that generates moiré patterns when you want the resample .
 
 
 
(This messages was à Google Translate).
 
 
 
 
Clyde

Not really a bug, but rewording might prevent some prepress headaches.
When exporting a CMYK document using PDF/X, the option to 'overprint black' could be reworded to 'overprint black at 100%'.
Black set to anything other than 100K knocks out, unless a global swatch with overprinting set is selected.
 



 

I haven't done print work in a bit, but now that I'm working in it again I could absolutely use 1-bit TIFF in my workflow, and the absence of this is missed.
If this is seen by the devs as low-priority, I would argue additional export formats/options are pretty key to image editing software, even more important than "cool" features.

Halftoning effectively blurs the edges of line art.
A printer (imagesetter) has a fixed resolution. All it actually print is printer spots of the same size. Printer spots are the actual hardware resolution of the imagesetter (typically 3000 or more spots per inch).
Halftone dots are made up of printer spots..Each dot in a halftone is a collection of printer spots, trying to simulate a circle..The number of different circle sizes possible is therefore determined by the number of printer spots available to simulate them. Divide the number of available printer spots (SPI) by the halftone ruling (LPI), and that's the theoretical number of different-size halftone dots (levels of grey) the device can print. That's why you always get more banding from, say, a 600 SPI laser printer than you do from a 3000 SPI imagesetter.
Everything in a greyscale image gets halftoned. That means the raster is printed as halftone dots, at the line ruling of the halftone screen (typically 150 lines per inch). It also becomes effectively anti-aliased by the halftoning.process.That's why black text that is part of a raster image looks fuzzy compared to black vector text stacked in front of a raster image.
1 bit raster objects do not get halftoned at all. They are simply "filled in" with tiny printer spots. So it's common practice to, for example, create or scan line art (think of the inking of a comic book illustration) as 1-bit rasters at something like 1200 PPI, which overlay grayscale or full color raster images. The color artwork prints as 1/150th inch halftone dots. But the 1-bit raster actually prints as 1/1200th-inch squares, giving a crisp, sharp-edged, aliased (not anti-aliased) appearance.
You can sort of think of 1-bit color depth as the "vector" version of raster imaging in that exactly what you've "drawn" simply gets "filled in" with the tiniest printer spots of the given output device. Take a look at this PDF: Zoom into it as far as you can. Tell me if you think it is raster image or a vector line.
JET

I work in book publishing and 1-bit TIFF files are essential. If you have a greyscale image, the printer's software will automatically apply a halftone screen, which degrades the image. This is really a sine qua non of a serious graphics program. PNG and GIF images are often rejected by printers. 

1-bit rasters are not just for particular repro methods, either. Colorizing a 1-bit diffusion dither is a great low-overhead way to achieve "grainy" textures in any vector illustration style, regardless of printing method.
 
JET

InDesign if i imported a bitmap TIFF file I could set its colour quite easily simply by selecting the image and choosing a colour from the palette. This proves very useful when working with simple logos and symbols that require being a specific colour. You could also set the background colour of the box the logo resides in just as easily. So with a few clicks a black and white logo could become green with an orange background for example without having to manipulate the original file.
Ive been looking and still not found a definitive answer for doing this in APUB. How does one work with greyscale/bitmap TIFFs and easily convert their colour within APUB without affecting the linked file?
 

As a time-served Compositor (most of you will need to Google that job) I have many years creating artwork on many typesetting systems from the early 1970s onwards. In recent decades, like many people, I have been using QuarkXpress and InDesign to build artworks. Unfortunately, those softwares are prohibitively expensive, so it comes a pleasant surprise to find a software that is on the surface, is a good as the industry standards at a reasonable price.
One observation is that I notice that Affinity Publisher does not include a Slug area. This is a much ignored and misunderstood feature within InDesign. It's sole, but sometimes essential purpose is to allow the creator of the artwork to place information on the edge of the artwork document that can be included or excluded from the  PDF sent to the printer.
This can be simply page numbers or essential information to the Printer pertaining to the page(s) it is attached to. The beauty of the slug area, is Adobe  PDF allow it to be included or excluded from the PDF, therefore it doesn't interfere with Imposition software but it can be included whereever it is necessary. 
In my decades of experience very few people understand its purpose, however it is to the professional artwork creator essential.

Hello Gang,
 
One of the techniques I use in Illustrator is to make a Photoshop graphic into a bitmap tiff, place it into Illustrator and then assign that artwork a color of my choice.
That apparently is not an option in Affinity software. (No such thing as Bitmap format in Affinity Photo)
What would be an equivalent in the Affinity world?
How would I achieve that same affect?
(The art must have a transparent background, allowing me to colorize the art at I wish within Designer.)
 

I think the OP means a 1-bit black-and-white image. I would like this facility in AP.
John

.
 

Monochrome, or 1-bit images, are extremely common in publication work. Basically any type of B/W line art illustration. But that encompasses things from b/w illustrations in simple books to encyclopedias, newspaper work, illustrations (from charts that lend themselves to it, scientific formulas and more), etc., etc., etc. All that I deal with are 1200 dpi and higher scans.
Depending upon the work, they are also colorized to fit publication colors (often a spot color in this circumstance). They are an extremely small byte size in comparison to gray or color images.
In the illustration below, that bird head column to column in width, 8600 px wide @ 1200 dpi and is 850k. A 300 dpi of the same px size is 11.8 megabytes. Now imagine a book of these. More realistically, there would be many smaller illustrations. Single column broadsheet (about 2"), an image will be less than 20k and a corresponding RGB or gray image will be at about 150k. 
It doesn't take a mathematician to decide that the file-size savings have an impact on a publication larger than a brochure (and hey, I've used these in brochures, too).

This was literally the first thing I tried after installing. It's such a simple tool and something I use very regularly. I also can't imagine switching to Affinity without it.

For comic work it is absolutely essential to have the option in a layout application to overprint a 1bit 600ppi up to 1200ppi black ink layer over a 300ppi colour one.
I tested this today for the first time in Publisher. While it imports 1bit bitmaps fine, I could not get it to output to a PDF that retains the high resolution black ink layer nor have it overprint a 300ppi colour one. It will either downsample and rasterize the 1bit bitmap to a 300ppi greyscale one, or just display a grey rectangle when I force it not to rasterize anything. 
It might be that I am missing a setting, though. So how do I output a PDF with the 1bit 1200ppi ink bitmap overprinting the 300ppi colour work?
PS  InDesign automatically treats 1bit TIFF bitmaps as overprinting objects, and will retain the original's resolution. In both PhotoLine and Scribus I turn on Multiply blend mode for the 1bit bitmap tiff, and it will overprint and retain the original resolution. But this does not work in Publisher, which downsamples the ink work.

It is indeed VERY common to use 1bit bitmap images in books (assigning spot color to it) and I cannot imagine using Affinity Publisher without support for it. 

Yeah, I often use 1bit bitmaps with pantone in 4c documents....

This is a pretty basic fuctionality that IMO needs to be implemented. Think about doing a two pantone leaflet, with a bitmap image. You can fill the foreground/background of the bitmap accordingly and print it with two pantones. Doing it via blend modes is impossibile, because wrong color values will be created. Bitmaps are very common in contemporary print graphic design.

Will you be introducing a feature to convert photo images to bitmap?  I refer to the ability to change an image to purely Black & White (not greyscale), with options for half tones and dithering to display grey areas.  This is something I have used a lot in photoshop, to prepare images for printing .To transfer to screens or to etch.

Sounds like you don't really know what the beta means. When you downloaded the free beta version you read this:
Affinity Publisher is not ready. It was not meant to be ready at this stage. It only works well enough now that we can test it, see if we like the interface & the way it works, and tell the developers which features we'd like to see in the future. Crashes are only to be expected. I think it's very cool that the developers made this beta open and free for all – they didn't have to do that. So the least the relatively small group of developers deserve for their efforts is that we keep our feedback constructive, don't you think? Don't expect the level of support that you'd get for a finished product.
Software development is not easy. Developing a complex suite of design software is not easy – that's why there are so few practical alternatives for Adobe's applications for professionals. I think Publisher looks very promising right now, pretty much as I expected. At beta stage I didn't expect to be able to do any actual work with it. I won't take on any big, demanding design projects with Publisher before I know it's feature complete.
Remember how the first version of InDesign was still practically unusable? People waited for it for a long time, and when it arrived, it had loads of bugs and missing features. It also cost a lot of money, and it was supposed to be finished & ready for production work.
Now you should maybe take a little breather and read through your post again and see how it sounds.

Sounds like you don't really know what the beta means. When you downloaded the free beta version you read this:
Affinity Publisher is not ready. It was not meant to be ready at this stage. It only works well enough now that we can test it, see if we like the interface & the way it works, and tell the developers which features we'd like to see in the future. Crashes are only to be expected. I think it's very cool that the developers made this beta open and free for all – they didn't have to do that. So the least the relatively small group of developers deserve for their efforts is that we keep our feedback constructive, don't you think? Don't expect the level of support that you'd get for a finished product.
Software development is not easy. Developing a complex suite of design software is not easy – that's why there are so few practical alternatives for Adobe's applications for professionals. I think Publisher looks very promising right now, pretty much as I expected. At beta stage I didn't expect to be able to do any actual work with it. I won't take on any big, demanding design projects with Publisher before I know it's feature complete.
Remember how the first version of InDesign was still practically unusable? People waited for it for a long time, and when it arrived, it had loads of bugs and missing features. It also cost a lot of money, and it was supposed to be finished & ready for production work.
Now you should maybe take a little breather and read through your post again and see how it sounds.

Hey The World's Biggest Frog..,
I'm sorry you're frustrated but as @midsummer has pointed out, there will be crashes and there will be bugs. This is an opportunity to see if you like the direction the app is going in and request features and functionality.
If you can tell us what you're doing when you get a crash, we can fix it. I would imagine there will be updates during the beta cycle but we need as much information regarding crashes as possible so they can be fixed and stability can be improved.
We decided to use a forum so that everyone can note their issues and other users can offer advice and support as well as the dedicated support teams. This allows the developers to keep their heads down and carry on developing/fixing the app without replying to emails all day. Occasionally the developers do directly reply but I hope you can appreciate they will be extremely busy at this time. I'm sorry if this doesn't work for you.
 

Sounds like you don't really know what the beta means. When you downloaded the free beta version you read this:
Affinity Publisher is not ready. It was not meant to be ready at this stage. It only works well enough now that we can test it, see if we like the interface & the way it works, and tell the developers which features we'd like to see in the future. Crashes are only to be expected. I think it's very cool that the developers made this beta open and free for all – they didn't have to do that. So the least the relatively small group of developers deserve for their efforts is that we keep our feedback constructive, don't you think? Don't expect the level of support that you'd get for a finished product.
Software development is not easy. Developing a complex suite of design software is not easy – that's why there are so few practical alternatives for Adobe's applications for professionals. I think Publisher looks very promising right now, pretty much as I expected. At beta stage I didn't expect to be able to do any actual work with it. I won't take on any big, demanding design projects with Publisher before I know it's feature complete.
Remember how the first version of InDesign was still practically unusable? People waited for it for a long time, and when it arrived, it had loads of bugs and missing features. It also cost a lot of money, and it was supposed to be finished & ready for production work.
Now you should maybe take a little breather and read through your post again and see how it sounds.

Now that Affinity Publisher is around the corner, it would be very strange if the suite of programs didn't get 1-bit bitmap support at some point, although it still doesn't seem to be on the public roadmap. I often need to work with screen printed CD and DVD labels, which all require bitmaps and spot colors. Every design job I get also involves placing barcodes and logos in printed materials, and around half of these logos are bitmaps too.
I know that everybody's always grumbling about that one particular feature they'd like to have and take personal offence if it's not immediately available. But I find the lack of 1-bit color space a really fundamental (and perplexing) flaw, since it's so essential in professional design work, and the Affinity applications are so versatile and mature otherwise. I like Photo and Designer, but currently they are little more than curiosities for me, since I can't fully use them in my workflow. I have to stick to my old Adobe CS5 applications for now.
(The lack of threaded text boxes in Designer is another major bummer, by the way.)

I often need to design CD packaging, including barcodes and silkscreened CD labels. 1-bit bitmap images are crucial for design jobs like these. I very much hope that the bitmap color mode will find its way to Affinity Photo in some future update. I already bought the program and I'd very much like to switch over from Photoshop, and right now it's only the bitmap issue that's holding me back.