dhemery Posted July 26, 2015 Share Posted July 26, 2015 I have created a paperback book cover in Affinity Photo, and now I want to export it as PDF to send it to the printer. I cannot figure out how to export a PDF that looks anything like what I see in Affinity Photo. (Nor can I export anything that looks right in any other format, for that matter.) Here is a screenshot of what the cover looks like in the Export Persona: Here is what the PDF (for print) preset produces (I made no adjustments to the preset): donation-cover-paperback.pdf This export appears to include the one pixel layer from the document, with at least some of the adjustments applied to turn the bills from dollar-bill color to blue. I cannot explain the grainy waviness. I have some fill layers, which either do not appear in the PDF or appear as white. My document has a layer mask that fades the edges of the pixel layer into the background fill layer, but it does not appear to fade here. The text (in layers above the fills and pixel layers) does not appear at all. The original image is dollar-bill colored dollar bills, with a certain amount of focus blur, but otherwise no fuzziness. Here is what the TIFF RGB 8-bit preset produces (I made no adjustments to the preset): donation-cover-paperback.tiff This appears to be the adjusted image, but without the text, and without the layer mask that fades the edges of the image. Again the text is completely missing. JPEG export looks similar to TIFF. I get these results from the "page" predefined slice in the Export Persona, and from the File -> Export command. The only thing I've been able to do that seemed to work is to merge the document into a single layer, then export that as PDF. I'm not sure I want to rasterize the text (I have never sent the printer rasterized text before, and am unsure whether the results will be what I want). Any clues about where I'm going wrong? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coranda Posted July 26, 2015 Share Posted July 26, 2015 Look in the slices panel. Do you have more than one entry there? I've found that if you're in the Layers panel and you select a layer then select a preset AP creates a new slice based only on the selected layer and it makes that the selected slice for export. In the Slices panel click on the slice with the same name as the file (probably the top one) and retry the export. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dhemery Posted July 26, 2015 Author Share Posted July 26, 2015 No layers selected. Only the one slice (the default "page" slice) appears in the Slices panel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coranda Posted July 26, 2015 Share Posted July 26, 2015 I can't reproduce this by just adding a text layer to a pixel layer. However, as soon as I added a live filter to the text layer it ceased to render on export. I've noticed a few problems with live filters. The trash printing, they aren't seen by the selection tools and now it appears they won't export. I think the first of these has been fixed in the latest beta so perhaps it's worth checking if this export problem is still there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coranda Posted July 26, 2015 Share Posted July 26, 2015 I've tried it in the latest beta and it's better but still not right. If the text has a live filter on it it will render now but it looks nothing like it should. I used black text with a Gaussian blur and it rendered without blur but partially transparent. I'll put together some instructions to reproduce this and post it in the bugs forum. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dhemery Posted July 26, 2015 Author Share Posted July 26, 2015 No live filters. One Outer Glow effect on the book title. One Brightness/Contrast adjustment above the art and below the text. One layer mask. A couple of fills, one with transparency and blending. Everything else is boxes. The original file is (temporarily) here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yb31m6me69cte60/donation-cover-paperback.afphoto?dl=0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coranda Posted July 26, 2015 Share Posted July 26, 2015 Upload the file and I'll have a look but from what you've said it sounds like a bug so will need to be looked at by someone from Serif. As a work around, in the Photo persona select the top layer and from the Layer menu choose Merge Visible. It will give you a single-layer, flattened version of the file without destroying the original layers. Hopefully that will then export correctly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dhemery Posted July 26, 2015 Author Share Posted July 26, 2015 Yeah, I did that before my original post, and it worked. Not sure why, but I'd rather not have to do that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
coranda Posted July 26, 2015 Share Posted July 26, 2015 It works because it renders the whole layer stack into a single bitmap placed on top with Normal blend mode - and hence hiding all layers beneath. So any problems export is having with rendering the lower layers doesn't affect the rendered image. Doing it that way is actually a common work flow and many people create that flattened image before doing final adjustments such as sharpening. Nonetheless, exporting should still work properly without that merge so it looks like this might be a bug. I suggest you post it in the bugs forum with a link to your file so the devs can determine what's going on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Harris Posted July 28, 2015 Share Posted July 28, 2015 I'm looking into this currently. There seem to be three groups of problems. The first group is the ones fixed by the beta. The second is due to layers being unticked in Export persona Layers; this results in them not being output, even though the Export persona still draws them. Finally, there are some remaining bugs in our export code which I'll fix ASAP. coranda 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Harris Posted July 29, 2015 Share Posted July 29, 2015 This should be fixed in the next beta. coranda 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dhemery Posted July 31, 2015 Author Share Posted July 31, 2015 Thanks, Dave. The second is due to layers being unticked in Export persona Layers; this results in them not being output, even though the Export persona still draws them. Do you mean that I neglected to tick some layers, or that AP somehow somehow left them unticked? I'm confident that at some point I made sure to tick them all, and did not see a change in the results. But sometimes I'm confident about stuff that I have no business being confident about ;-) Looking forward to the fixes. I'm quite enjoying AP for book covers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Harris Posted July 31, 2015 Share Posted July 31, 2015 I'm saying the file I downloaded, which I think came from the first post in this thread, had some things in the Layers tab unticked. They default to ticked, so at some point someone must have unticked them and not reticked them. With them unticked, Affinity wouldn't even try to export them, but there were other problems as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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