[Im having alot of trouble with PDF X4 exports with publisher lately]

Hello,

I do print work with publisher and recently the issue rate with the PDF export is sky high for me. Im running into rendering issues with every 2nd export and its extremely annoying. 

affinity being unable to cope with complex gradients is one drawback i learned to live with, but fighting all sorts of random elements erroring out on pdf export that look fine in publisher is getting too much for me. i run a business off of this and having to check every single element for rendering issues is extremely tedious and costs me alot of extra time and if i miss something, i gotta cope with the reprint cost. and i already had one big print with a rendering issue that slipped through that i had to replace and get things straight with the customer.

i have the most issues with pdf/x4 (that i need due to gradients & transparency) and the most errors are either gradients or strokes just being corrupted or not rendering at all. for example theres a  line of text and it has a stroke applied, and sometimes, randomly, some letters dont get the stroke applied while earlier versions of the file rendered the stroke fine. then i need to get into it and redo the stroke for it to come back. it all looks fine in publisher, its just the pdf export with vectors that are visibly broken. fully rasterized pdfs do NOT show this issue. i also had gradients that are just plain white or have black strokes across.

I dont have anything to show right now because i either already fixed the issues or the files are under NDA.

since a few months I also got a new issue: one of my main online printers wont let my pdf x4 files pass the automatic print file test on upload - it will just lock up and i cannot place the order. i always have to call back and make them add the files to the order manually. apparently im the only one that runs into this issue - and connecting dots it might be that im the only one using publisher exported pdfx4.

im using the msix version. i didnt try reinstalling and switching the installer version because i need that machine running, its my daily app to use.

so does anyone else have the same issues or some ideas to resolve that?

[Designer / Publisher - Expand Stroke on Text Fails for "A" when placed on path]

Hello,
this evening i have been working on a logo and for some reason expanding stroke on the "asap condensed" font placed on a circular path fails to correctly expand the stroke on the letter A. Affinity will only do some truncated bits in the A hole (hahaha) but not the full stroke. 

All A's in the text fail, all other letters work. Creating a new simple text A in the same font and doing the stroke expand works. Just this particular text doesnt work - it also doesnt work when you convert text to path manually. 

Printing and exporting the PDF also shows the same issue.

Heres a screenshot:

 

And heres the publisher file:

expand stroke corruption.afpub

[Benchmark results v20000]

On 3/25/2023 at 12:13 PM, cgidesign said:

E.g. do you have it active when using the Affinity apps or do you need to disable openCL because it is causing crashes, stalls etc?

no crashes, drops, stalls, flickering or other issues. arc has been running really well for me since december driver updates - before that, not so much. but today, in fact, in productivity apps, arc has been ALOT better than radeon. be it capture one, affinity or davinci resolve. the a770 is an extremely good option at its price point with 16 gigs of vram.

just for reference, this is an overclocked 6800 XT with an overclocked R5 5700 and its scoring worse than a gtx 970:

[Affinity 2.0 is Hideously Slow/Buggy on Windows]

before you get your pitchforks out, please consider that the affinity photo benchmark scores are easily skewed from version to version due to changed score weight or scaling. serif also stated that platform to platform is not exactly comparable.

i noticed my cpu score dropped from 2.0 to 2.03, but that doesnt automatically mean that performance dropped, it may just mean that the same performance now reports with lower scores. this is also the case with, say, cinebench for newer versions.

that said, here is my score with a ryzen 9 5900X and an intel A770 running native on win10:

 

as you can see the A770 actually scores really well in comparison to nvidia. its just amd thats so terrible. i have smooth performance with the system. if nvida runs well and intel runs well, maybe its amd and not affinity.

the truth is: amd is selling gaming cards. and amd doesnt care at all about productivity. i have had my fair share of issues with radeon cards and the intel arc cards in beta stadium actually run perfect in comparison. i had image corruption issues in capture one with openCL on a vega56 that baked into the export and it took over a year for an update (driver or program) to fix the issue - i reported that issue to amd several times. the corruption was caused by a newer version of the amdopencl.dll in the newer drivers. copying in the old radeon driver opencl dlls fixed the issue.

[AMD Radeon GPU OpenCL poor perfomance]

the intel cards are way better than amd in any productivity task for the money and also really competitive against nvidia - the a770 is the only good productivity card with 16gb of vram for under $1000. the only pressing issue for arc is game support and some teething issues with the driver interface. ive been using two arc cards for a month - im still getting into it, but for video and photo editing those cards work better than my amd cards already.

[AMD Radeon GPU OpenCL poor perfomance]

for intel arc the scores are good. its an issue isolated to amd. intel arc is so fresh and unoptimized - if amd doesnt work with affinity, it seems the openCL of RDNA is just broken.

[Benchmark results v20000]

with the new 2.0.3 update the benchmark got changed. the scores for my A770 improved from 9000 to 13000, roughly. the cpu score decreased a little bit. can someone else retest their sytem to confirm this?

[Benchmark results v20000]

AMD Ryzen 5900X, 2x16gb DDR4 3600 CL18, Intel Arc A770+A750 Multi GPU, Win10
For some reason the A750 is the main GPU in this dual GPU setup, even though the A770 is in the first pcie slot and is set as primary gpu in windows and in affinity. the a770 alone scores about 9000.

[AMD Radeon RX Hardware Acceleration]

@Eroica yes, brush performance on amd cards is abysmal, especially with rdna1 and 2 cards.

i got my hands on intel arc A750 - i have to play around with it some more, but with a ryzen 5 3600 @4,3 ghz the gpu scores 8000 points in raster single gpu. gonna upload the screenshot later, its saved on my testbench in the basement.

considering @debraspicher had an rtx3080 score 10500 points here, with a faster cpu, the result for the intel gpu is actually quite good when you look at the price of just $290 for the A750.

[Extremely disappointed that this installs as an "App" and not regular software program]

i also hate the new install routine - not because its new, but because everything microsoft touches turns sour. a new installer could have been a good thing, instead microsoft takes away all control from the user - you dont see what happens. it feels like installing a trojan horse. after installing for the first time i was scratching my head where the install went.

microsoft is just completely lost with the direction they push windows in. windows 12 will be like android, and windows 13 will be like slot machine. throw money in, use that one key you are allowed to use and be surprised what comes out of it.

[Photo Benchmark 11021 Results]

5900X and RX5700XT

[AMD Radeon RX Hardware Acceleration]

 

5700XT and ryzen 9 5900X.

this is my gaming machine - workstation is running a threadripper 2920X and vega56 - so at least openCL works a bit better. but im quite fed up with radeons for work. davinci resolve doesnt run without stuttering either. capture one has started giving me artifacts with openCL acceleration again (thankfully not baked in when exporting, was a fun time in 2019), even had a gpu related system lockup while editing. time for team green, amd just doesnt care.

 

checked the gpu utilization and the card clocks to its full 3D clocks and draws more power, but the load duration in the benchmark is extremely short. gpu only is less than a second and combined is maybe 2 seconds of load.

[Install V2 onto another drive?]

due to the new microsoft installer package i dont think this installer allows a different install path. its annoying.

[CMYK document + RGB image + Selective Colour Adjustment = "Wrong" colours in print]

@Leighi just want to report that with my epson ET7750 i also have issues with printed colors from CMYK publisher documents.

whenever i export to PDF and print with acrobat pro, the colors are correct.

this is where i have issues:

publisher document in CMYK, pictures (jpg) in CMYK, placed (embedded or linked doesnt matter) in the document. when i print the document, no matter what i configure in the affinity publisher printer menu, i always get wrong and oversatured colors in the pictures (vectors created in publisher seem to be fine). theres something going on in the CMYK color management system. that said, all affinity apps also display CMYK clamped in the srgb colorspace, that also produces wrong CMYK screen output (especially on calibrated wide gamut displays).

printing RGB pictures in affinity photo seems to work normal or at least not as obviously broken.

if you need more infos, please just hit me up. i will provide everything you need. i can do some comparison test prints and scan or photograph them.

[Affinity Photo for Windows - 1.10.0]

with this update i see basically doubled openCL performance with my RX Vega 56 compared to previous versions.

the integrated benchmark was 4500 for single gpu raster, now its 9500. feels alot better, too. gonna switch back to openCL acceleration (disabled it because cpu was faster on my machine). thanks, great update

[Free Transform, Perspective & Warp Tools]

banged my head against the desk to 10 minutes because i couldnt find the transform tools to do it - turns out, they dont exist.

 

cmon serif - this has been missing since 2017. please implement it.

i need this to make advertisement previews on buildings in publisher with the print files placed on top of a photo. i mean i could use a different program, but i really want to do it in publisher because it would be a great workflow. dont wanna switch back to adobe 😕

[AMD Radeon RX Performance Problems]

3 hours ago, Mark Ingram said:

For reference, I have an RX Vega64 here, amongst other cards, and haven't noticed any issues

i believe vega underperforms significantly, too, at least when comparing the photo benchmark scores and i have had some serious hangs while retouching with my vega aswell. i never saw any dedicated vega card exceed the scores of a R9 290X or a RX 580 or RX 5500XT and vega is significantly more powerful than those three cards - vega scores should be at least 50% higher than what they are at the moment, at least for mine and yours.

that said, i dont know what kind the load of the openCL acceleration is and how well it can be spread over the CUs of the gpu and im no programmer, just my impression as a power user and hardware nut.

[AMD Radeon RX Performance Problems]

1 hour ago, Mark Ingram said:

Our main problem is that we can't buy any Radeon RX cards, from anywhere! They're completely sold out from what we can see

gpu shortages are a thing since november and will continue throughout 2021 because of the mining boom, possibly until early 2022. no way you're getting anything new in the next 6 months without paying triple the usual price or waiting months for delivery.

i highly suggest trying to get a rx580, rx570, vega 56/64 for GCN architecture or a 5600XT/5700 for RDNA 1 on ebay - in germany there are plenty of offerings - quite expensive for a used old cards, but its way cheaper than trying retail. radeon 7 and 6800 series are gone except for those rare >1000€ offerings. i dont know your budget, maybe thats a sum you can easily put up with.

for loaning you could try hardware stores in the UK or tech youtubers based in the UK, like buildzoid. he has tons of GPUs, he might has some spares.

[AMD Radeon RX Performance Problems]

threadripper 2920X

radeon rx vega 56 (seriously underperforming, lol)

[OpenCL Activation Slows AP 1.9 for Windows with AMD RX 5700 GPU]

i was working on a 16 bit aRGB from the nikon D850 today with opencl enabled and i had to wait several seconds for the program to become responsive again after transforming some pixel layers or just doing mask brushing and clone brushing, and clone brushing is especially bad. i know photo can usually handle this workload ok, not great, but ok.

i ended up disabling opencl because i couldnt finish the job like that. photo just hung for several seconds when doing normal retouching workflows.

those D850 files really eat up alot of resources in general, but this was noticably worse than without opencl. to be able to use the hardware acceleration i updated my win10 from 1903 to the 20h2 version and this generally screwed the system in some ways, but i cant just wipe my workstation and casually reinstall windows10. thanks microsoft for the great update experience 🤢

edit: just reenabled openCL and let photo recompile the openCL cache and the massive several seconds long hangs went away, but its still somewhat laggy and cloning brush still wrecks performance. again - the d850 files are really demanding to work on with any software. i just wished having opencl acceleration would speed things up as massively as capture one for me. from what i can tell openCL in photo doesnt give me any extra performance at best and is significantly slower at worst on this system.

system:
threadripper 2920X / 32gb 3600CL16 ram
vega 56 flashed with vega 64 bios, overclocked and undervolted to 1600mhz core clock, 1150 memory clock, driver 21.2.1.
cpu & gpu watercooled with 3x360mm radiators
2x adata SX8200 pro 1TB as system and workdrive

 

i also feel like the system should score higher in multi cpu and gpu performance, especially the gpu. the 5700 in the post above scores 50% higher, although actually vega should be faster than a 5700XT in most compute tasks.

[Affinity Suite shows weird CMYK Colors vs Adobe on my Wide Gamut Display]

this seems to check out, thanks for your insight. so it is indeed affinity related and not some weird software, OS or calibration issue on my side - which narrows down the way to a possible solution or work around or developer attention.

any ideas on how you cope with that? i dont know why this never stroke me working on an srgb monitor, but now the issue kinda sticks out like a sore thumb. i have alot of print stuff to do with exact color values in cmyk, so doing my work in argb and then exporting to cmyk is not exactly appealing.

its kinda unsettling to finally have a monitor capable of displaying close to real cmyk colors and then getting stuck in dreadful srgb translation in affinity - the affinity workflow kinda grew onto me vs the adobe suite.

i looked up setting files and registry entries, but the setting files really just contain what the in app preferences contain - so no easy switch to flick.

[Affinity Suite shows weird CMYK Colors vs Adobe on my Wide Gamut Display]

Hello,

im having issues with the cmyk color reproduction in affinity suite while adobe software (photoshop, illustrator, acrobat) shows quite accurate cmyk colors. of course its not the "real thing" as cmyk is cmyk, but you can quite easily pinpoint 100% cyan as such in adobe, and not even close in affinity. output colors (values) via pdf export are correct, but are apparently truncated down to srgb(?) for display output on my wide color gamut monitor (100% argb color space) which greatly shifts blue and green colors from the "real" cmyk colors that should and can be somewhat displayed in wide gamut, and adobe software does just that. in an affinity cmyk document 100% cyan looks like desaturated sky / baby blue, but if i create an argb instead of a cmyk document in affinity cyan begins popping, just like in acrobat, illustrator and photoshop, but these do it even within a cmyk document.

at this point i dont know what exactly is going on and im trying to make sense of it. are there some hidden settings for affinity to control display color space? did something break? did i screw up the monitor setup?
i have cross checked srgb vs srgb content with an old calibrated 8bit srgb monitor vs my wide gamut one and photos and web in itself looks very close in a color managed environment. i just never stumbled over this drastic difference in color rendition between affinity and adobe.

thats my setup:

win 10 1903
acer predator xb323U (10 bit, 100% argb) calibrated and profiled for srgb gamma response via displaycal + spyder5, but the monitor is not a professional display with hardware calibration support.
Adobe CS6
newest affinity suite

the files below are jpgs in argb, but maybe the upload to the board broke them - im also new to the wide gamut thing. anyway, the differences should be clearly visible in srgb, too!

the screenshots show how different apps display 100% cyan.
top left is affinity designer in an ECI 300% CMYK document and it looks awful - the color is just miles off.
bottom left is affinity designer in an argb document with 100% cyan and it looks ok.
top right is adobe illustrator in ECI 300% CMYK with 100% cyan and it looks good.
bottom right is adobe acrobat showing actual print files in ECI 300% CMYK with 100% cyan (file created in affinity) and color proofing shows something close to illustrator - in wide gamut its very close visually.

the 2nd screenshot shows the exact same, except for adobe acrobat having simulation profile switched from ECI 300% to srgb, and its the exact same color affinity designer shows.

in an srgb document with srgb color values illustrator and designer show the same colors.

i also included the first screenshot as pdf in argb in case the board dismissed the color profile or whatever. if you set the simulation profile to a wide gamut rgb (photo rgb, argb, you name it) on a wide gamut display you should see what i see.

is there a way to make affinity display what adobe displays? or has someone an idea what went wrong on my end, if that is not to be expected behavior?

thanks, looking forward to your input!

affinity cmyk1.pdf

[Affinity Photo - Constrain drawing tools to straight lines]

i really love the things you do here with affinity - so much stuff is so neatly thought out and more convenient than in adobe products.

but this feature is so important - it really needs to be included.

im a game developer who does texturing by hand, and without the contrained movement its impossible to stack up multiple passes with a brush on an exact line.

[Affinity Photo for Game Devs]

yep, +1 - i'm a gamedev myself and approve this request.

[CAD like features]

this would be great, i second this.