Assigning an ICC Color Profile when Printing

[Dazmondo77]

9 hours ago, panelson3 said:

For those of you who are printing with the Affinity products, are you happy with the results you are getting?

I use CMYK end to end for the majority of my work as it's mostly destined for commercial print and I have a Xerox Phaser 6180DN which does a pretty good proof match, so I've always (for the past 21years) printed off a proof for the job bag, but Affinity just can't handle CMYK properly when printing direct so my only option is to create a PDF and print proofs from Acrobat pro 9 which I think is a 32bit app that is really slow but at least works in Mojave - it's pretty bad that an app targeted at pros just assumes you are printing to an inkjet (that nowadays seems to convert CMYK data to RGB then back to CMYK) I have discovered that outputting a proof page with a custom colour bar and a CMYK photo and choosing ColorSync / and choosing the documents colour profile (FOGRA 39) that it will  produce an acceptable proof with accurate CMYK in the colour bars but I've discovered that sending a page with contains gradients of each CMYK to white messes everything up so those solid colours are no longer solid and any vector information and fonts, although the retain CMYK, look as though they are pre-rasterised before hitting the printers built in PS RIP - so nice sharp vectors and fonts become all messy - and apple Preview is just as bad so I'm stuck with Acrobat unless anyone has any alternative suggestions - Yes I could always go back to Quark, Indesign, Freehand, Ilustrator to print accurate proofs but I want to use Affinity, I'm sure I've read somewhere on the forum in the past that theres no plans to fix this 

[lacerto]

(...)

[panelson3]

13 hours ago, Dazmondo77 said:

Yes I could always go back to Quark, Indesign, Freehand, Ilustrator to print accurate proofs but I want to use Affinity, I'm sure I've read somewhere on the forum in the past that theres no plans to fix this

Affinity’s apps seem so capable in many ways. It’s such a let down that printing seems to have these kinds of issues, and you have to kluge together a workaround with Acrobat. It makes me wonder if there is some kind of licensing/expense issue with integrating a CMM and providing a proper in-app ICC color managed workflow - that maybe they don’t want to pay for so that they can keep there prices down.

12 hours ago, BofG said:

Overall it's "usable" and is worth the downsides versus paying an Adobe subscription or buying a dedicated RIP. Certainly room for improvement though.

Yeah, I just downsized my Creative Cloud subscription to just Photoshop and Lightroom, hoping Affinity Designer and Publisher would be good (and inexpensive) replacements.

I just sent out a book job to the printer that I put together in Publisher. The submission was exported pdf files, so I’m hoping that the color and type look alright. If not, I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

[rpnfan]

On 6/21/2020 at 10:42 PM, panelson3 said:

Affinity’s apps seem so capable in many ways. It’s such a let down that printing seems to have these kinds of issues, and you have to kluge together a workaround with Acrobat. It makes me wonder if there is some kind of licensing/expense issue with integrating a CMM and providing a proper in-app ICC color managed workflow - that maybe they don’t want to pay for so that they can keep there prices down.

Affinity just seems not to be interested in a large portion of the (more) professional market. When I work with others and they want to send me Indesign-files and I say that I use Affinity Publisher they typically have not even heard of it! And for good reason if you ask me. As long as colormanagement is not fully supported this is show-stopper to use it for many commercial applications. A year ago I posted a summary what is needed regarding color management. But most Affinity users do not, neither does Affinity as a company.