Threshold and Color Adjustments in Affinity Designer

[David Williams83]

Good Evening Team,

Right now I am trying to create a brand mark in Affinity Designer. 

I have my art board open and I have a simple brand mark in black placed on the art board against a white background. 

The brand mark has very crisp edges and I want to soften them, so I have added a heavy Gaussian blur to the brand mark layer.

Here is the issue. 

 - I want to use the threshold filter on the brand mark layer to round out the edges of the Gaussian blur effect. When I try to apply the threshold filter adjustment on the brand mark it doesn't change the sharpness of the image at all. 

- If I promote the threshold filter above the mark to a new layer I can change the sharpness... this is all great but shouldn't the filters affect the layers they are on? 

- Also, if I successfully apply this technique to a brand in black and white I am not able to change the color of the black mark to anything else. 

- I need to be able to apply these filters to weather and soften the brand mark and then convert the new mark to a path and fill object that can be manipulated on its own.

Is there anyway to do this? 

Hopefully, the images I have attached show the step by step process I'm trying to use to achieve and where I get stuck.

Thanks,

Dave 

 

[lepr]

To make sense of the app behaviour, you need to realise that Affinity adjustments (Threshold Adjustment, for example) and filters (Layer Effect Gaussian Blur, for example) output a raster result, even when applied to a vector object.

8 hours ago, David Williams83 said:

 - I want to use the threshold filter on the brand mark layer to round out the edges of the Gaussian blur effect. When I try to apply the threshold filter adjustment on the brand mark it doesn't change the sharpness of the image at all. 

- If I promote the threshold filter above the mark to a new layer I can change the sharpness... this is all great but shouldn't the filters affect the layers they are on? 

The blurred object is all black with varying alpha, not varying colour (greys in your example). Threshold Adjustment affects colour, not alpha, therefore it has no visible effect when applied to the blurred black object alone.

The composite of the blurred black object over the white rectangle has varying colour (greys in your example), so applying the Threshold Adjustment to that composite does produce a visible effect.

8 hours ago, David Williams83 said:

- Also, if I successfully apply this technique to a brand in black and white I am not able to change the color of the black mark to anything else.

Threshold Adjustment always produces black and white, but then you can overlay the black and white result with a colour using Screen blend mode. However, if you will be creating a vector version of your logo, then there is no point in colouring until you have that, and then it will be a simple case of giving the vector object a fill colour.

8 hours ago, David Williams83 said:

- I need to be able to apply these filters to weather and soften the brand mark and then convert the new mark to a path and fill object that can be manipulated on its own.

The result of the blur and threshold is in raster form and no current Affinity app can convert raster to vector, so you will need to either manually draw the required paths or use another app to do a conversion.