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39 minutes ago, BofG said:

Now say one prominent colour is out of the print gamut, and just makes the design look off. You can create adjustment layers (...)

I would expect that I don't need to do color manipulation myself because the output profile (f. print or screen) is quite aware of its boarders (limits, 'virtual fence') and therefore would by itself and automatically, during conversion, move the out-of-gamut colors to a position inside their gamut. Solely instructed by my render intent selection.

Like it does work for document color space conversion from RGB to CMYK, where the profile causes out-of-gamut colors being moved inside its limits of CMYK. There I also do not manually manipulate too vivid greens or pinks with an adjustment layer or sponge brush to make them fit to the printing inks cyan and magenta.

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If you are targeting more than one output media, then you have more than one compromise to make. In this case you can choose the best middle ground yourself rather than just letting each profile get as close as it can.

Imagine if one media say orange looks dim and blue is fine, but another media is the other way round. Now you can see that, and choose to "dim" the bright colour on each to get consistency between the media.

All soft proofing does is give you that view on the output at design time, what you do with that view is up to you.

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FWIW, here are a few things I have gleaned from the info included in this discussion & from other web sources (particularly the tutorials on the Cambridge In Colour web site) that seem relevant here:

  1. Soft proofs are useful for approximating what output to a different device (particularly to a printer) will look like.
  2. Rarely if ever is this 100% accurate.
  3. Soft proofs do not perform any color correction.
  4. For soft proofs to be of any use at all, the chosen profile must closely match the characteristics of the output device. For printers, this must include the characteristics of the ink, paper, etc.
  5. OOG overlays are useful only as very crude indicators of what might be out of gamut, quite possibly not even for that, are probably implemented differently in different apps, & in any case are of little to no use in indicating how far out of gamut a color might be.
  6. The profile & rendering intent together determine what the soft proof will look like. This is what is intended to be used as a guide to decide if or to what extent manual adjustments are necessary to get the appropriate or desired output.
  7. There is no "one size fits all" answer for this. Some images may need little or no manual adjustment. Others may respond well to certain adjustments, but which (if any) work well will be strongly dependent on image content & the desired effect, which may be to achieve some artistic or stylistic effect rather than a technically 'correct' one.

The short version is (or so I think) using & interpreting soft proofs is an acquired skill, one that I am not even remotely close to mastering (& probably never will). 😢

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1 minute ago, BofG said:

All soft proofing does is give you that view on the output at design time, what you do with that view is up to you.

I think that sums it up quite well.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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1 hour ago, panelson3 said:

I forgot to ask this with my last post. During your time on this forum, have you ever seen anyone from Serif/Affinity respond to a question or comment on a post?

Often.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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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 

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10 hours ago, panelson3 said:

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

Not really. I have an Oki c911 for producing business cards, so sharp text is important.

There are a few issues:

1) Vector output is just not as sharp as it is from Illustrator. It's not an "in your face" difference, but it is perceptible.

2) As @Dazmondo77 mentions above, CMYK output is impossible. Which if you stop to think about it is just ridiculous. This is the biggest problem, it means the colour management is nonsensical when using application colour management with a CMYK profile.

I do print directly from Designer, but I have to use Windows colour management. If I want to print a document with a "K only" black then I have to export to pdf and print from another application.

3) A minor issue, but still a bit annoying - about 20% of the time the print will fail to be sent. The progress bar pops up and completes, but nothing is added to the print queue.

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

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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.

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  • 1 year later...
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.

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