Crop Marks Not Touching Image

[pattmayne]

Hi.

I bought Affinity Photo to make CMYK book covers for printing presses. They need me to provide a PDF complete with crop marks (and spine marks). They need these crop marks to reach the edge of the document like this:

 

 

But when I export my file (whether I choose to "include bleed" or not) It always inserts extra whitespace between the image and the crop marks like this (where the yellow is the book cover's color):

 

But I know that it's possible to get the lines flush with the image because I saw a video where a guy does it like this:

 

So what am I doing wrong? I'm not using margins at all (and when I do it doesn't change anything). The bleed and trim are all incorporated within the document. I just want to export a PDF with crop marks touching the very edge!

Please help! And thanks for reading.

 

EDIT: Also, if anybody knows how to include "Spine Marks" then that would be great too!

Edited September 11, 2020 by pattmayne
added a question about spine marks // added more info

[Old Bruce]

10 minutes ago, pattmayne said:

 

I bought Affinity Photo to make CMYK book covers for printing presses. They need me to provide a PDF complete with crop marks (and spine marks). They need these crop marks to reach the edge of the document like this:

Photo doesn't have the Bleed property so you will have to fake it.

However much bleed is needed will be added to the document, however much  extra width is needed for the printers marks is needed will also have to be added.

You will need to make (or copy paste from a PDF) the marks for the spine and cropping.

[pattmayne]

2 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Photo doesn't have the Bleed property so you will have to fake it.

How can I do this? I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean just drawing the lines in manually?

My position right now is that I will totally disable the "include printer marks" options, and manually create all the marks. But this is not preferable since it's more work for me.

[Fixx]

Affinity prefers that users do just photo and pixel illustration editing with Photo and use Designer or Publisher for creating press ready art. So, unfortunately one software does not do all. 

Manual marks is of course possible but I am not sure if it creates complications as PDF file will have metadata about document size.

[Old Bruce]

You can try these trim marks, they are vectors, in Photo they will appear to be pixelated but if you export as a PDF they will remain vectors.

crop marks.afphoto

[h_d]

In the long run, for producing CMYK print material, you might want to invest in Affinity Designer or Publisher. Both let you set bleed dimensions and output pages in the way that you hope to achieve.

[pattmayne]

25 minutes ago, h_d said:

In the long run, for producing CMYK print material, you might want to invest in Affinity Designer or Publisher. Both let you set bleed dimensions and output pages in the way that you hope to achieve.

Between Designer and Publisher, which one would do this the best?

While I still have the free trials of both then I'll check to see how this works. But I haven't got it to work yet. Is it about setting the bleed dimensions? Does this happen in the export dialogue, or elsewhere?

EDIT:

In Designer I changed the bleed settings, and that had no effect on the export. I can't seem to get rid of that whitespace in Designer, Publisher, or Photo.

Also, I can't afford multiple pieces of software anyway. And I'm confident there's a way to make this work in Photo.

Edited September 11, 2020 by pattmayne
update

[h_d]

I personally would use Publisher - it's geared towards print output whereas Designer is more directed at web graphics/user interfaces etc. But either would work.

In Publisher:

Create a new document, and set the bleed as specified by your printer (3mm all round is typical in the UK):

 

When the document opens, you'll see a lightly coloured border outside the main white page area:

 

When you design your page, make sure that the background image extends to this line, all the way round:

Don't place any important text or image detail closer than 6mm to the bleed line.

Export the document, set to PDF, check Include Bleed:

 

Click the More button and check Include Printers Marks:

Click Close in the dialog box, then click Export

That's about it...

 

 

 

[pattmayne]

3 minutes ago, h_d said:

Click Close in the dialog box, then click Export

That's about it...

I followed those instructions in Publisher with a brand new document, but it's still adding that white space!

 

I find this really baffling since nobody else seems to have this problem, and I have it on all three Affinity products.

 

[h_d]

Can you upload the Publisher document?

[pattmayne]

10 minutes ago, h_d said:

Can you upload the Publisher document?

I attached the file, but I also found the problem in regards to Publisher. I hadn't filled out the bleed enough (it's drawn outside the visible image).

So now I found that I can set the bleed in Publisher and use that to open the image in Photo, and then export, and the crop marks are flush with the image. But I cannot set the bleed within Photo.

 

Obviously I'll never pay another $70 for that single feature. I'm extremely poor. There must be a way to set the bleed within Affinity Photo. It would be ridiculous to not include that.

Publisher is only useful to me for that one single feature. So there has to be a way to do this one thing within Photo.

 

What is going on here? Is Photo making a pretend bleed without my permission and sticking it between the image and the crop lines?

margin_buddy.afpub

[h_d]

See my previous instructions. In Publisher, you need to extend the background image to the external bleed line, This is your Publisher document:

 

This is the "lightly coloured border" that I referred to in my previous post. 

The probable reason that you've missed it is that your Publisher page is absolutely colossal:, you've chosen a Page Preset of A0. Check out your Spread Setup:

When you create the Publisher document, it needs to be at the same size as your printed product.

If you get it right in Publisher, you won't need to use Photo for this.

[h_d]

14 minutes ago, pattmayne said:

There must be a way to set the bleed within Affinity Photo.

As far as I'm aware, there is not. It's a photo-editing program, not a page layout program.

[pattmayne]

1 hour ago, h_d said:

If you get it right in Publisher, you won't need to use Photo for this.

I need Photo for every other function of this work. This one little tiny thing, Photo does not do. And yet Photo deals with bleeds in the export dialogue, so it makes sense that they'd include some control over bleeds in the menus.

 

1 hour ago, h_d said:

As far as I'm aware, there is not. It's a photo-editing program, not a page layout program.

That's fair.

 

I'll add the crop marks and spine marks manually. It's useful to find out what each app does NOT do, so thanks all for the answers. It would be absurd to buy Publisher just to adjust the bleed, and Publisher doesn't create spine marks anyway (there should be a Book Cover Template which does ALL this stuff). So I'll do it manually!

[h_d]

4 minutes ago, pattmayne said:

And yet Photo deals with bleeds in the export dialogue, so it makes sense that they'd include some control over bleeds in the menus.

True enough.

[Fixx]

You might want to try using a Publisher document with bleed as a base file for your AP designs. If Publisher file has bleed defined it carries over to AP. Probably you can change size, colour space, profile and content as you will and bleed settings stay. Just include bleed and desired printers marks in export to PDF.

Try this version: 

margin_buddy_Fixx.afpub

[Schreibenswert]

Hi there.

I had a similar issue. I could check any bleed and crop mark box in the piece of software but the picture wont touch the cropping marks.

The issue was in a afdesign file. Created with AF Designer and I edited the pictures with AF Photo (minimal invasive with filters). Everything was fine back then a year ago when I created the file.
Yesterday I had to update some things in the file and send it to print again. 2h before my deadline ended i encountered the issue.

Solution: I applied all the live filters I added with AF Photo on the pictures. That was it with my minimal invasive workflow picture wise, but at least I had this issue solved. To be precise it was the "focal length" live filter that created that bug. As soon as the live filter disappeared from my file the PDF export with bleed worked fine again.

Hope it works also for you and spares you to switch to the big "A"

Edited May 18, 2021 by Schreibenswert
added screenshot