Saving a 1-bit black & white graphic

[Medical Officer Bones]

22 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Oh!, very bad, indeed. – For what reason you prefer 1-bit only?

 

As I explained, the black-and-white line art is printed at a much higher resolution than the colour work. Same as with black vector and text: those are printed at the image setter's / printer's native print resolution (this is a gross oversimplification) not needing any dot patterns (halftones) thus printed much sharper than grayscale or colour art.

It needs to be 1-bit because of that. Because it prints at the native print density of an image setter or printer. You can't have any anti-aliasing, because dot patterns are not allowed - or at least, you can control your own dot patterns (halftones).

I checked your PDF, and yes the left circle overprints. But all shapes are anti-aliased, which is also unwanted behaviour when doing this type of work. And all shapes are 300ppi, which is useless. We want to retain 1bit high resolution art, and overprint that.

[Medical Officer Bones]

8 minutes ago, Fixx said:

Sharpness – 8-bit images will be halftoned, 1-bit images do not. I just hate seeing halftoned b&w comics in our n:o 1 newspaper. Text and all.

You explained it more succinct than I did. Indeed!

Here is an example of the wanted PDF output. The black line art is 1200ppi and set to overprint, and the colours are 300ppi. Notice the difference in pixel size. The colour work will be halftones, while the 1bit line art will retain its sharpness when printed - just like black text, or black vector art. No halftones there.

Absolutely essential for all sorts of print work. Without this option, Publisher is going to be handicapped from the very start. Just like Affinity Photo is with the lack of 1bit support.

[thomaso]

5 minutes ago, Fixx said:

Sharpness – 8-bit images will be halftoned, 1-bit images do not. I just hate seeing halftoned b&w comics in our n:o 1 newspaper. Text and all.

There is no such influence in sharpness simply by color depth.

If text appears blurred it contains halftone edges to make it appear antialiased. Of cause a grayscale image can contain pure Black only.

[Medical Officer Bones]

5 minutes ago, thomaso said:

There is no such influence in sharpness simply by color depth.

If text appears blurred it contains halftone edges to make it appear antialiased. Of cause a grayscale image can contain pure Black only.

Yet, there is. 1bit prints without being rasterized to half tones. 8bit is always rasterized and converted to halftones. A grayscale 8bit image contains 0-255 shades of gray, and even black will be printed at 300dpi (dots!). A 1200ppi 1bit black line will, however, be printed at that resolution (barring the quality of the paper, and the subsequent dot gain).

[thomaso]

27 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

A grayscale 8bit image contains 0-255 shades of gray, and even black will be printed at 300dpi (dots!). A 1200ppi black line will, however, be printed at that resolution

A grayscale may contain 255 shades of gray – but doesn't have to. – It is a matter of contrast. – Here a grayscale with no antialising:    grayscale pure black.tif

  

 

 

27 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

grayscale (...) will be printed at 300dpi (dots!). A 1200ppi black line will, however, be printed at that resolution

I don't understand your thoughts about resolution – it sounds to me you think 300 dpi being too much but otherwise to miss resolution if 1200 dpi get reduced.

[Medical Officer Bones]

You are missing the point. Do you understand how halftones and LPI (lines per inch) work in print tech? If not, look it up.

Printing black and white line art at 300dpi is too low for a quality print. Refer to @Fixx answer about terrible looking comic strips and lettering when printed at 300dpi in a news paper, or in black and white print.

[Medical Officer Bones]

Here is an infographic explaining the comic printing process. If printing on high quality glossy paper, a ppi resolution of 800ppi for the 1bit tiff file is a good idea, but it might be higher than that depending on the quality of the printer. The colour may be printed at 400ppi for high quality prints.

Publisher is unable to achieve this workflow and retain the resolution of the black line art.

[thomaso]

48 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Publisher is unable to achieve this workflow and retain the resolution of the black line art.

For the following PDF a grayscale.tif (incl. alpha) got placed twice (300 dpi + 1200 dpi) and an rgb.jpg (300 dpi)
The complete page got exported with 1200 dpi.

170330 spot color & varnish DPI.pdf

In the resulting PDF I get from Acrobats preflight the info about 3 images: two in 300 dpi, one in 1200.
I don't see neither resolution loss nor anti-alising in the grayscales, they look sharp and pure black, even in 5000 % view.
 

=================

Last but not least:
Yes, I do see the unsatisfying, disturbing issue that AfPub is treating 1-bit as 8-bit. Apparently, this way AfPub unnecessarily requires additional hours from users and file size.

But different than I thought this morning when I came here from the AfPub forum (via link of BennyD) I got the impression that both
– bitmapped highres black-only text and
– spot-colorizing black-only images can be done.

Unfortunately, in AfPub definitely more complicated than expected and more than usual for other tools than AfPub.

[Medical Officer Bones]

Yes, as long as 1bit support is lacking, we will have to deal with work-arounds, or just rely on alternative software. A bit frustrating, because when I open your PDF in PhotoLine it takes two clicks to create the proper 1bit layer and overprint it. Two more clicks to assign a spot colour. InDesign treats these type of 1bit tiffs automatically as overprinting.

Let's hope the Affinity devs will add this support before 1.7 is released. I think, because of the lack of 1bit support in the other Affinity apps, this may take longer for them to implement, however. I suspect it's just not part of the core functionality of Affinity, and will take more effort on their part.

Thanks for all your testing!

[000]

Just want to add my voice for this too -- 1bit support is important for a lot of things, from a logo over text up to pencil drawings, cuttings, plottin, artistic effects …

Please include this in a future update!

[BennyD]

9 hours ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Here is an infographic explaining the comic printing process. If printing on high quality glossy paper, a ppi resolution of 800ppi for the 1bit tiff file is a good idea, but it might be higher than that depending on the quality of the printer. The colour may be printed at 400ppi for high quality prints.

Publisher is unable to achieve this workflow and retain the resolution of the black line art.

wow. thank you for lining out more useful cases for 1-bit-tif than I expected first.

[BennyD]

@thomaso

don't know what happened but here again. 

Skull5.pdf

Skull5b.pdf

[thomaso]

@BennyD, I see your both PDFs from InDesign for the goal to print on non-white material with spot colors.

But I don't see a practical printing use in your layout method multiplying spot-colored objects on top of each other. The fact that you can't print those in 1 go (because White has to dry before printing on it) doesn't make it necessary to simulate the visual result in a PDF for print.

Instead I'd layout this with one object only and tell the printer to print that 1 plate for both: first with White ink, then on top with Pantone 100. So, such a print PDF would work even it shows visually one black object only.

However, I do agree, to colorize 1-bit images is too complex in AfPublisher, regardless it can be done with old-fashioned workarounds that do not use today's technology.

[BennyD]

It's not multiplied. It's overprint and it works in one single run on a UV direct to plate printer. The spot color which is set to overprint here is assigned to the white color in the RIP and is printed underneath first although it's above here. But again in one single print run. And with the extra channel you can do things like printing white just under particular parts or print only 30% white etc.

 

Karte_Druck_600perc_weiss_unterdruckt_BD_X3.pdf

[thomaso]

Quite cool! I wasn't aware of that UV-print capability. – So, you can do that in Publisher, with a spot + overprint color swatch and assigned to Publishers interpretation of 1-bit image.

It "just" lacks in a correct preview. I do experience a nasty occurrence on layout page (no transparency for white image areas even if overprint) but it appears to export as wanted.

[Michael Hurley]

@thomaso: I haven't commented before, but here's another use-case for 1-bit support like in other layout applications (QuarkXpress, InDesign, PageMaker, etc.). At my printshop we just ran a mailing job with letters offset printed 2-color spot. The customer wanted the letter text in black with their signature in blue to look more like it was hand-written with a biro. I scanned their signature at 2400 DPI (that's our platemaker's native resolution) as a 1-bit TIFF, inserted it in InDesign, and applied the PMS blue swatch to it. Instantly spot separatable art without having to mess around with Photoshop Monotones or Illustrator vectorization tools. This cannot be done with grayscale, RGB, or CMYK raster graphics. It's a quick, simple, accurate method, and it works every time. It baffles me that the Affinity Suite do not support this in any way. It's literally an industry-standard print workflow (as evidenced by all the above commentary).

[thomaso]

4 hours ago, Michael Hurley said:

It's a quick, simple, accurate method, and it works every time. It baffles me that the Affinity Suite do not support this in any way. It's literally an industry-standard print workflow (as evidenced by all the above commentary). 

This reminds me to the disappointing experience many years ago in inDesign where it was not possible to colorize a grayscale.JPG and its need to convert as .TIF first. – In that concern Publisher appears advanced. (I even may adjust contrast, for instance to a biro hand-writing, without leaving the application.)

But, yes, I also do agree, 1-bit can have advantages towards 8-bit, especially for spot-color print production. So it is hard to understand that 1-bit is not supported yet, especially since 1-bit is less complex than 8-bit.

 

[MikeW]

4 hours ago, Michael Hurley said:

...This cannot be done with grayscale...

Sure it can.

[MikeW]

Depending on the signature--like if it has distinct fading lift-offs and thick/darker set-downs--I will use gray scans for signatures as it looks more "lifelike."

[Michael Hurley]

40 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Depending on the signature--like if it has distinct fading lift-offs and thick/darker set-downs--I will use gray scans for signatures as it looks more "lifelike."

Well lookit-dat. I wonder when Adobe added that feature? I guess I've been doing this for too long. It never occurred to me to even check if you could apply color to grayscale images. Still, for offset work I think I'll generally stick to ultra-high-res 1-bit. I actually scan them in color, clean them up, and then convert them to bitmap in Photoshop. That way I can control screen settings with a bit more detail than our platemaker gives me. Good to know I have another option, though. Thanks for that!

[MikeW]

You're welcome. ID has been able to for quite some time. I've may have a document that says when. The application screen shot is from QXP. It's been able to since probably 3.x. About 1993. I would need to look it up too.

Yeah, I mostly use 1 bit for them as well. But at 150 lpi and greater on glossy they do look great.

[BennyD]

I've used this feature since 2005 as far as I remember. Quite sure. So it must have been CS2 or CS3

3 hours ago, MikeW said:

You're welcome. ID has been able to for quite some time.

 

[Sonofwitz]

I'm absolutely in support of this. this is a necessary feature, the support of 1Bit graphics.  It's all about the separations, spot colors, and high rez line art.
I've been working like this for 20 years. I am surprised to find this is an obscure approach.  

On 5/20/2019 at 5:39 AM, BennyD said:

Actually, it's a bit off topic after all, because our problem of not being able to save 1-bit-tif-files in the first place doesn't let us create images which could be used in this very practical way.

Sorry BennyD, just because the software can't make em, doesn't mean we don't have the graphics to use. I have many and can make them elsewhere. Often clients supply them.

 

 

[Nazario]

+1 for bitmap support. I have hundreds of client logos in 1bit bitmap TIFF files which would be impossible for me to redraw as vector even though that would be the best way forward.

 

[Finrach]

Just adding my support too. Hadn't truly realised just how much we use bitmap Tiff or recoloured greyscale within our artwork. QXP2020 is our main page layout app and handles those formats brilliantly but the blend of the 3 Affinitys is an exciting alternative. This is a crippling omission however.