CANNOT EXPORT WITHOUT RASTER

[ALEX0105]

I just realized after hours of work that I'm not able to export the file in pdf without parts of the design to be rasterized.

Example: I have  a polygon image of an animal, made of hundreds of polygons, and I needed ot chnge the colors: so I applied a colorize effect on that image to match the color scheme of the design.

Same has been done for the backgound texture, I applied a color gradient.

Now I tried ot export in pdf or swg and in both cases those parts have been rasterized and I canno tfind a way to have a real pdf vector. How is this possible?

With Illustrator I had no problem to change colors using gradients or color effects and save pdf that are full vectors!

Somebody could help me?

[thomaso]

Hi ALEX0105,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

Most (not all) Affinity effects, filters and layer blend modes cause rasterisation on PDF export. This is related to the specification of the Adobe PDF format (not: Affinity) and its allowed handling of various transparency options.

When saving in Illustrator as PDF (note: it's no Export) you probably save its editable AI format, too. That may result in a different impression / occurrence of its PDF content when re-opened in AI.

[ALEX0105]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

Hi ALEX0105,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

Most (not all) Affinity effects, filters and layer blend modes cause rasterisation on PDF export. This is related to the specification of the Adobe PDF format (not: Affinity) and its allowed handling of various transparency options.

When saving in Illustrator as PDF (note: it's no Export) you probably save its editable AI format, too. That may result in a different impression / occurrence of its PDF content when re-opened in AI.

This is a serious limitation of the program then. The obvious reason to save in pdf format when required, is to retain the vector shapes. How could I have worked otherwise? I used a vector design purchased as stock, and needed to change the colors. I couldn't just manually change every single polygon (hundreds of them) so I applied a overlap color mode to it. Pretty normal procedure.

But when I have to output the design I need to give the customer a vector, not a raster image.

When saving a file from illustrator as a pdf file, it's a full vector, so why shouldn't Affinity do the same? If this is the way it works, than it simply doesn't work. Any useful tip so I don't have to do the whole job again with AI?

[thomaso]

4 minutes ago, ALEX0105 said:

This is a serious limitation of the program then.

It is a limitation of the PDF format (<– Adobe). That's why I explicitly wrote "not: Affinity".

If you open such an AI-saved-PDF in a non-Adobe PDF viewer app you might notice a lack of your settings. Also in print unwanted results may occur if you send such an AI-PDF to a print service.

8 minutes ago, ALEX0105 said:

I couldn't just manually change every single polygon (hundreds of them) so I applied a overlap color mode to it. Pretty normal procedure.

In the current AD beta is the often requested "Select Same..." feature (e.g. same fill color) which enables you to auto-select all objects with a certain color and assign a custom global swatch to all of them by 1 click.

[ALEX0105]

8 minutes ago, thomaso said:

It is a limitation of the PDF format (<– Adobe). That's why I explicitly wrote "not: Affinity".

If you open such an AI-saved-PDF in a non-Adobe PDF viewer app you might notice a lack of your settings. Also in print unwanted results may occur if you send such an AI-PDF to a print service.

In the current AD beta is the often requested "Select Same..." feature (e.g. same fill color) which enables you to auto-select all objects with a certain color and assign a custom global swatch to all of them by 1 click.

Where can I find this feature? I will check The "select same" but I'm afraid it won't work in this case, cause every single polygon has a different shade or color, it must be a faster workaround. In  the end how could I provide the customer with a common vector file, if they don't use Affinity?

[ALEX0105]

20 minutes ago, BofG said:

Is that the other way round? An AI file can contain a PDF stream, I don't think a PDF can contain AI file data.

You need to download the beta:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/60-affinity-designer-beta-forums/

(Follow to your OS, the download link is in the first sticky post).

I don't think you'll be able to do this effectively in Designer if you have such a range of colours, any effect or adjustment layer will rasterise whatever objects it applies to so you would have to select and change each set of polygons. I guess AI must be smart enough to work the filter back to the objects' colour and is therefore maintaining the vectors.

So I'm afraid I'll have to stick with AI..... It's quite disappointing as I liked the overall simplicity of Affinity...

[Dazmondo77]

I think your best bet would have been to start the job from the offset with a global palette - only using those global colours and tints of those globals - it's the way I start every job and saves so much wasted time - although the 'select same' addition to the latest beta is also a life saver 

[ALEX0105]

1 minute ago, BofG said:

In a fresh document scenario that is indeed the best approach, sadly the whole digital artwork world is built around Adobe..

 

Sadly true....

[John Rostron]

I assume that what you have is  a series of polygons, with a variety of colours specified.

If you export your unmodified image as an svg file, it should easy to edit this in a plain text editor and change all the colour specifications to your desired target specification. You may need to use a regular expression for this (try /[A-F0-9]{6}/).

John

[lepr]

3 hours ago, BofG said:

Is that the other way round? An AI file can contain a PDF stream, I don't think a PDF can contain AI file data.

You need to download the beta:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/60-affinity-designer-beta-forums/

(Follow to your OS, the download link is in the first sticky post).

I guess AI must be smart enough to work the filter back to the objects' colour and is therefore maintaining the vectors.

Yes, some vector apps have adjustments which affect the fill/stroke colours of the vector objects, in contrast to AD's adjustment layers which affect rasterisations of the objects.

 

4 hours ago, thomaso said:

It is a limitation of the PDF format (<– Adobe). That's why I explicitly wrote "not: Affinity".

The limitation is Affinity. There are vector graphics apps (some are free) where adjustments (such as Recolour, HSL Shift, Curves, etc) modify the fill and stroke colours of the vector objects, whereas Affinity adjustments modify rasterisations of the objects.

AD is greatly lacking in features which are expected in a vector design and illustration app.

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, anon2 said:

The limitation is Affinity. There are vector graphics apps (some are free) where adjustments (such as Recolour, HSL Shift, Curves, etc) modify the fill and stroke colours of the vector objects, whereas Affinity adjustments modify rasterisations of the objects.

Ah, yes, this indeed is a missing feature. – My answer was rather related to the exported PDF, mentioned in this topic's initial post, and the fact that within Affinity a color adjustment (or blend mode) doesn't cause rasterisation, but occurs on export only.

[lacerto]

(...)

[ALEX0105]

Quote

 

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Yes, but the point of this thread is that this rasterization happens specifically in PDF exports created by Affinity but not exports created by other apps (e.g. InDesign or Illustrator). In these situations there is nothing in PDF format itself that requires rasterization.

 

Lagarto, thank you indeed for your detailed post, this is exactly what I meant when I started the thread. Before writing here I really tried everything because it seemed impossible to me that a Vector software wasn't able to export full Vector files. It's really an unacceptable limitation of this App. If the developers will not fix this, to me it's almost useless.

Edited November 4, 2020 by ALEX0105

[lacerto]

(...)

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, Lagarto said:

(...) is dependent on how the objects are stacked and blend modes applied. You can get e.g. vector blend modes correctly exported also from Affinity apps, if you apply them separately for objects or compose object groups in a specific way.

Thanks for your tests & texts. – Especially a "correct" layer nesting & stacking order appears to be tricky to handle since the Affinity UI doesn't preview a possible, certain export result already, for instance concerning document's vs. export color space [Edit: can get via softproof adjustment] or concerning rasterised objects.

This reminds me to another topic where @anon2 points out a kind of rule:

On 7/31/2020 at 12:37 PM, anon2 said:

The Passthrough Group contains live filters/adjustments only: the filters/adjustments do pass through the Group.

The Passthrough Group contains a mixture of live filters/adjustments and other types of object: the filters/adjustments do not pass through the Group.

Or to this topic with a conclusion by @Gabe about the order of layer nesting / stacking:

On 10/15/2020 at 3:46 PM, Gabe said:

Only PDF/X1 is affected by the wrong order (it's not that obvious in your case).

 

[lacerto]

(...)

[thomaso]

30 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

I am not sure what is meant above by mentioning that this applies to PDF/X-1a:2003 export method only

I am sorry if I my quote was misleading. Note that both quotes belong to different threads and subjects (which I linked, too). So the topic with Gabe's answer was not related at all to rasterisation but to the layer stacking order for unexpected color effect of adjustment layers on export. (which, honestly, doesn't make Gabe's answer more clear in my perspective)

[lepr]

56 minutes ago, thomaso said:

So the topic with Gabe's answer was not related at all to rasterisation but to the layer stacking order for unexpected color effect of adjustment layers on export. (which, honestly, doesn't make Gabe's answer more clear in my perspective)

The problem of that thread was not one of stacking order.
The problem was the colour mode in which the adjustments were being calculated and composited was RGB for the CMYK JPEG export versus CMYK for the CMYK PDF export.

[lacerto]

(...)

[ALEX0105]

We went off topic

[lacerto]

(...)

[ALEX0105]

any update on this? Has the issue been solved?

[waveman777]

I don't really use much gradients, but today I discovered that I cannot export or copy objects from Affinity Designer to Adobe Illustrator without having all objects with gradients rasterised!! I believe this is the most ridiculous limitation ever. I wasn't sure if this was related to the complexity of the design, so I tested with by creating a new document and adding a simple rectangle with basic linear gradient. After copying the element to Illustrator, I got en error that "An unknown shading type was encountered". And indeed, the element became a path with colour bitmap inside. 

I just cannot believe it.... Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it worked properly in some earlier versions of Affinity Designer. Well. this software is becoming more useless to me over time... I hope it's just a temporary bug.

[Dazmondo77]

11 hours ago, waveman777 said:

I just cannot believe it.... Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it worked properly in some earlier versions of Affinity Designer. Well. this software is becoming more useless to me over time... I hope it's just a temporary bug.

Gradients are working as expected for me copy / pasting  back and fourth between Publisher beta 1.9.1.967 (latest) and illustrator cs5 (15.0.2) - even rotated gradients inside shapes inside shapes x5 remain fully editable both ways, although skewing the gradient even slightly seems to rasterise once pasted into illustrator

[dReas]

+1 Being able to copy gradients back and forth between Illustrator and Designer would be really nice.

Here's hoping that version 2.0 doesn't rasterize in the same way version 1 does.