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lineweight

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Everything posted by lineweight

  1. It's a bit hard to understand what's in it for Canva. Surely they haven't paid an enormous amount of money, to enable you to carry on making upgrades for existing users for free.
  2. From the FAQ I bet V3 will come as a subscription model. I wonder if a cut-off date will come, after which if you haven't purchased the current software, there will be no further opportunity to buy a perpetual licence. That's what happened with the CAD/3D software I use. They try to make out they are being kind to long-time users as we can still buy a "perpetual" licence each year but the first year we don't buy one, we lose that, and are forced into a subscription only arrangement. The affordable cost and non-subscription pricing are Affinity's USPs, for me at least. Are the apps themselves amazing or unique? No, they are simply good and let you get the job done. Disappointing that this seems to happen to absolutely everything now.
  3. Ok. Thanks. This works when the image is listed in the layers pane as "(image)" but not when it's listed as "(pixel)". I'm not sure why they are different as they are both tiff files placed into picture frames.
  4. Thanks. I actually was looking at that thread before starting this one. These are the methods listed there 1) Go to Document > Colour Format > Greyscale. Although I never use this as it's destructive and removes the colour information permanently 2) Go to Layer > New Fill Layer, fill it with white and set the layer blend mode to 'Colour' 3) Add a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer and change the Output Channel to 'Grey' 4) Add a Curves Adjustment Layer, set the layer blend mode to 'Colour', then drag the bottom-left corner point of the curve to the top-left corner (so that it's a horizontal line) 5) Add a HSL Adjustment Layer and drag the 'Saturation Shift' slider all the way to the left (-100%) 6) Add a Black & White Adjustment Layer 7) Add a Black & White Adjustment Layer, and change the default values from 100%, to the following values to mimic method 3 (adding a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer). R=29.8%, Y=88.5%, G=58.9%, C=69.9%, B=11.4%, M=41.2% (for RGB 8-bit images only, the values will be different for RGB 16-bit images). You can record this as a macro. 😎 Add a Soft Proof Adjustment Layer and set the Proof Profile to 'Greyscale D50'. This will mimic method 1 (Document > Colour Format > Greyscale) 9) To do it via 'Layer Effects' for a layer or group. Open the 'Layer Effects' settings. Go to 'Colour Overlay' and set Blend Mode to Colour, Opacity to 100% and Colour to white or black. Method 1 wouldn't work for me as I don't want to change the whole document, just certain images. Methods 2-4 and 7-9 would be rather laborious to do individually for each image. Method 5 doesn't seem to work for me. I can do this on two images and they don't end up the same tonally. Method 6 does work. However, it does something to the image that I need to fix by adjusting levels. That's OK but it worries me it's introducing changes that don't need to happen. So, am wondering if there are any better approaches. If not, I'll go with this.
  5. Realised I had to activate "show context toolbar" in the view menu. I don't seem to get the "K only" option though, when I select an image in a picture frame.
  6. I've seen this mentioned in other threads but I can't seem to find it in my top toolbar. Do I need to be in a particular persona or have something turned on?
  7. I have multiple B&W images in a Publisher document, some of which have actually been scanned in colour. So if I do no adjustment on them, they are all slightly different in tone (some of them have a sepia tone, some slightly blueish). I'd thought that using the HSL adjustment, simply moving the saturation slider right down to the minimum would make an image truly monochrome, but this does not seem to be the case. Is there a best-practice (or least complex) way of making all these images consistent in tone?
  8. Can I ask why you'd do the adjustments before converting? Would it not be better to see the final results of what I'm going to get, while I'm actually doing the adjustments? Or is it that I can do the adjustments in RGB to get what I'd ideally like, and then leave the conversion process to give me the nearest best version within the limits of CMYK?
  9. Hmm, as I thought might happen, two conflicting opinions. But I have asked the printer if they can recommend which profile I use and/or send me the one for their printer.
  10. I am coming up against this problem too. So the only solution is to use a very thin stroke for the outline? Is 0.2p what works or would 0.1p work too?
  11. I'm reasonably comfortable making adjustments to RGB images in Affinity Photo. And usually the images are for display on screen or maybe in within documents to be viewed online, so I don't need to worry about converting to CMYK. Now however I am producing (in Affinity Publisher) some PDFs to be sent to a commercial printer, so the document is set up as CMYK. These PDFs will contain multiple photos that I am placing into the Affinity Publisher document, and because all these photos will be alongside each other I will want to do some tweaking to colours to make them reasonably consistent. Plus there are some that are scanned where I'll want to remove bits of colour cast and so on. My question is: where in my workflow should I make these colour adjustments? a) Get them all as good as possible, editing them in Affinity Photo still in RGB, and then import them into the Publisher document (at which point I assume Affinity does some kind of conversion on them)? or b) Import them all as they are into the Publisher document, so the RGB to CMYK conversion has already happened, and then do my tweaking and adjusting? If I use method (b) then when, say, I do a levels adjustment on the images, it all looks slightly different to what I'm used to, which is a little disconcerting but I'm not sure if I need to worry about it. But if there are no major downsides to that method, it's possibly what I'd prefer to do because it allows me to make the adjustments while the images are next to each other and in their final context.
  12. Actually I have just discovered that I can, after all, include crop marks etc via the "Export" dialogue. Just have to press the "more" button at the bottom to access these options.
  13. Yes, I will ask them. But even if I send them as single pages most of my questions remain. Ok, thanks. Ok. It seems surprising that what seems like quite basic functionality is missing from Publisher.
  14. Most of the time when I'm using Publisher it's for stuff that I'll print myself or which will only exist in digital format. I now need to make a booklet that I can prepare as a PDF to send to a commercial printer, and am trying to get my head around how best to do this. It appears there are two routes to creating a "print ready" PDF: Option 1: The "Export" function in the "File" menu - This will export a PDF laid out as a series of spreads, that is page 1 will sit next to page 2 just like it will in the finished booklet. (Alternatively as a series of pages where each page appears as its own individual sheet) - I can choose to include bleeds but I can't include crop marks - So the PDF is something like this: Option 2: The "save as PDF" function in the "Print" dialogue - Here I can choose "booklet" as an option for the "model" and then it will export a PDF laid out as the sheets will actually be printed at the printers - which from my limited knowledge is known as "imposition". So page 1 will no longer sit alongside page 2 in the exported PDF. - I can choose to include bleeds and I can also include crop marks - I think this is only available because I have a mac (it's actually done via the OS not Affinity?) - So the PDF is something like this: My questions: - Are there any pitfalls to worry about, using one route rather than the other? For example, is using the "save as PDF" approach more likely to add issues with things like colour management because the OS is getting involved with the output as well as Affinity? - Am I right that there's no way to add crop marks if I want to use the File>Export approach? Therefore, if the printer requests that the PDF I send them includes crop marks, I must use the "save as PDF" method? - Am I right that the "dimensions" under "spread setup" is where the size of the finished printed document (that is after the printer has trimmed to size) is set, and the only place I ever specify the overall size of the print-ready PDF document (that is, including any bleed, crop marks etc) is when I get to the print dialogue? - As a follow-on to the above, if I simply use file>export to export a PDF to the printer (and include the bleed), then the overall size of the PDF they receive is the "spread setup" dimensions plus the bleed along each edge? Therefore, for them to know what the intended finished size is, I need to tell them the bleed size and then they need to subtract this from the overall size of the PDF I have sent them (because there are no crop marks on the document itself)? Thanks if anyone can clarify any of this!
  15. I tried the "flatten" preset (this was before adding the background rectangles) and it didn't work - actually it made it worse. However - it sounds like maybe it would have worked to add the background rectangles, then use the "flatten" preset, without having to do the merge on each page prior to export, which would have saved a bit of time.
  16. Thanks for posting this. Helped me solve a similar problem. I had some scanned b&w images (as pixel layers) with white background laid out, all on a white artboard, but fringe lines were showing up in PDFs when viewed in some PDF viewers. Making a white rectangle, same size as artboard, and placing it behind everything didn't work by itself, but merging it with the various pixel layers, then exportinh from this, did.
  17. Firstly, forgive me if I might be using some wrong terminology here. I have some PDF versions of an old leaflet. There are two versions: Version 1: This is a series of A4 (landscape) sheets. When the leaflet was made, these were printed out, stacked, stapled in the middle and folded, to create an A5 (portrait) sized leaflet. This resulted in all the pages appearing correctly in the finished leaflet, but of course the A4 document doesn't make any sense to look at on screen, because pages 12 and 1, 2 and 11, and so on, are alongside each other. Version 2: The document is separated out into a series of A5 (portrait) pages. These are arranged in the correct order, so read OK on screen, except that wherever the original document had a double page spread, you only see one half at a time. What I want to do I want to take either of these PDFs and convert into a new PDF, which will open such that the paired pages are alongside each other, and read in the correct order. Is this something that I can do easily in Publisher?
  18. Well, it doesn't seem that there's anything I've overlooked. It's a shame that V2 hasn't brought any changes to the way we can use styles ... in previous threads I'd got the impression that I wasn't the only one frustrated by these limitations. My cash was ready to hand over, to upgrade to V2, but it doesn't look like it actually brings any major benefits for me, over V1, at this point.
  19. Thanks for your reply @h_d On 1) yes you are misunderstanding my point - having set up the styles just as you have shown, I want to then use the pen or pencil tool to draw multiple thick green lines, then use the pen or pencil tool to draw multiple thin red lines. Rather than applying the styles retrospectively to already-drawn objects, as in your video. On 2) I will have to investigate "symbols". [edit - I don't think symbols will do what I want. They are for repeated instances of a particular object.] On 3) you are right, I can use the esc to deselect the object, but I wish this extra step were not necessary. With some tools (for example after using the node editor) you have to press esc twice ... just to find out what properties your next line will be drawn with. For me it constantly interrupts fluency.
  20. Here are 4 significant things that have always frustrated me about version 1 of Designer: (and I'm just talking about basic curves/lines created using the pen and pencil tools) 1) I can't easily flip between different "styles" whilst drawing. Let's say I have two styles: "thick red line" and "thin green line". I want to easily draw 2 thick red lines, 3 thin green lines, 1 thick red line, 10 thin green lines, 2 thick red lines, etc etc. After I have drawn a red line I want to do one action (say, click on a style in the sidebar) in order that the next line I draw is green: draw in red; click; draw in green. But instead, the most efficient process I can find is: draw in red; switch to "move" tool; find & select a pre-existing green object; press "synchronise with defaults"; select pencil tool; draw in green. 6 actions! 2) I can't define a "style", apply it to a bunch of objects, then retrospectively adjust the properties of the "style" and have these properties apply to all the objects I've previously applied that style to. This is the one biggest thing that I hoped might appear in V2 because it's something I'm used to being able to do in other drawing programmes I use, and it's quite fundamental to the concept of non-destructive editing. 3) If I have an object selected, then pick the pencil or pen tool, there's nothing on the screen that tells me what the basic properties (stroke, stroke colour, fill colour) of the next object I draw are going to be. In other words I'm not shown what Affinity calls the "object defaults". I'm shown the properties of the selected object, but only get to know what the "object defaults" are if I actively deselect the selected object. I'd hoped that the little colour indicator at the bottom of the LH tool column, which seems to have appeared in V2, might be showing me the current "object defaults", but it just repeats what's in the "colour" palette. 4) Although I can save things like pressure or velocity control and profile as part of a "style", these properties aren't picked up when I use "synchronise with defaults". This means that I can't set up a "style" with particular pressure or velocity control characteristics and then draw a bunch of objects with those characteristics. I have to draw them all then apply the style to them restrospectively. As far as I can see, all of these things are still an issue in V2. Or are there things I have overlooked (for example, new methods of doing the things above that I want to do)? As far as I can work out, I don't think the new "style picker" tool helps me with any of the above. (I'm also happy of course to be told that I can actually do any of these things in V1)
  21. Yes, I think this is the solution, a blank rectangle the size of the canvas (in each group), then another one used as a clipping mask for the object that sticks out over the edges. I've just been trying this. I thought I could also make this rectangle a "linked layer", but I notice that if I do this, changing the size of the rectangle in one instance, doesn't change its size in other instances (whereas, for example, changing the fill colour in one instance does change the fill colour in other instances). Is that what is supposed to happen?
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