Bleed area issue with Designer - bug or feature?

[William Overington]

I am not expert in using Designer, essentially a beginner, and I am not professionally trained in printing terminology.

I am enjoying producing what are notionally custom photo greetings cards, yet I am using computer generated artwork.

Thus far I have produced two, the first of  which arrived here a while ago and is now framed and displayed on a wall of my home and the second one is in the post on its way here.

I am, essentially, pushing the envelope on what are everyday greetings cards as if they are art prints. They also do art prints that are dearer and if I can get good at producing artwork I might well buy one or more of those too.

The first one is landscape format, using

https://www.papier.com/landscape-photo-313

I am very pleased with the result.

and the second one is portrait format,  using

https://www.papier.com/portrait-photo-315

It has not yet arrived here.

Both are text and I generated the artwork in Serif PagePlus X7. They also had a white background.

Helpful discussion with Papier staff, both by email and online chat and links to web pages that they supplied enabled me to work out what I needed.

It was a jpg, 7 inches by 5 inches, 300 dots per inch, CMYK, with a 3 mm bleed area on each edge.

I worked using pixel measurements and used 2171 pixels by 1571 pixels.

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I am now wanting to produce some artwork in Designer.

The particular Papier template that I am intending to use is the portrait format one that I used before.

It allows me to use colour to the edge of the card, like a lot of the quality A5 non-specific occasion cards that are often available at museums, art galleries and some bookshops and the like.

So I am thinking that I need to paint, I shall probably use the watercolour brushes, into the bleed area.

So I did a test, the result of which is interesting.

In Designer I set up a 7 inch by 5 inch drawing, and to make what happens clear I used a 1 inch bleed area on each edge. One inch is far more than the 3 mm that I need to use in teh artwork, but this is a test.

So I used the diamond tool to draw a large diamond with its leftside point touching the left edge of the displayed Designer document.

I then exported a jpg including bleed areas.

I opened the jpg in Microsoft Paint and teh diamond was 1 inch in from the left edge of the image.

So it seems to be able to draw colour to the edge of the artwork for the card, that I need to generate a document that in larger than 7 inches by 5 inches by 3 mm on each side and not have, as far as Designer is "aware", a bleed area at all, then export from Designer without a bleed area. That should produce artwork that is regarded by the papier system as having a 3 mm bleed area on each edge and, provided I have drawn the artwork correctly, have colour going right to the edge of the card.

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Having chosen the CMYK/8When setting up the colour profile and not understanding which to use I used Agfa: Swop Standard as I thought that as the greetings cards are intended to use a photo, rather than computer generated artwork, that that one looked as if it might be nearer to a photograph. Is that right? In any case I shall, as before, unless advised otherwise in this forum, not include an ICC profile in the jpg file.

William

 

 

 

 

 

[William Overington]

I have now produced a Designer document using pixel measurements that is portrait format 1571 pixels wide and 2171 pixels high with no bleed areas.

I drew, using the touch pad on my laptop computer, an arc using a green watercolour brush, almost up to the left edge of the document, then exported as a jpg file.

I then loaded the jpg file into Microsoft Paint and simulated (though just on the leftside edge) the Papier bleed area physical card trimming process, by horizontally flipping the image and reducing the width to 1535 pixels, then horizontally flipping again.

It worked well, I got green paint up to the edge.

Here is the jpg as exported from Designer.

William

 

[William Overington]

Interestingly I noticed that Paint gives the background colour as r=255, g=250, b=247.

Why is that please? Is it to do with the CMYK format or is it a built-in feature of Designer, or maybe I am using a default setting?

William

 

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

So I used the diamond tool to draw a large diamond with its leftside point touching the left edge of the displayed Designer document.

I then exported a jpg including bleed areas.

I opened the jpg in Microsoft Paint and teh diamond was 1 inch in from the left edge of the image.

The left edge of the document area, or touching the outer edge of the bleed area? The bleed is outside the document area. Thus, if you have a 7x5 inch document with 3mm bleed you will end up with a (7 inch + 6mm) x (5 inch + 6mm) document, with the image centered. And the printing company will trim off the 3mm all around, leaving you with the 7x5 inch document that you wanted.

Make sure you have View > Show Bleed enabled, and that you are not using an Artboard. You need a canvas instead of an Artboard to see the Bleed.

[William Overington]

33 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

The left edge of the document area, or touching the outer edge of the bleed area? The bleed is outside the document area. Thus, if you have a 7x5 inch document with 3mm bleed you will end up with a (7 inch + 6mm) x (5 inch + 6mm) document, with the image centered. And the printing company will trim off the 3mm all around, leaving you with the 7x5 inch document that you wanted.

Make sure you have View > Show Bleed enabled, and that you are not using an Artboard. You need a canvas instead of an Artboard to see the Bleed.

Thank you for posting.

The left edge of what was on the screen for the first one, I had got show bleed area ticked by default rather than my intention, but it seems that somehow, possibly by me getting it muddled, the bleed area was not shown on the screen.

I have never used artboards. I have just had a quick look to find out what they are.

I'll try again now, from the start.

I have tried it again and I cannot get it to work as far as I can tell.

This time I used 7 inches tall by 5 inches wide and used a bleed area 0.25 inches wide on each edge and a watercolour brush that is blue.

Here is the result.

I am not going to leap to a conclusion that there is a bug, but could you possibly test it and observe what happens please?

William

 

 

[walt.farrell]

Please provide your actual Affinity Designer .afdesign document, not just the exported JPG file.

[William Overington]

I loaded the file into Affinity Designer this morning, not to change anything. I noticed that there is now a new update available.

I produced the document yesterday using version 1.9.0.

I do not know if that makes any difference to this example, but here it is anyway.

William

 

test of bleed area 2afdesign.afdesign

[walt.farrell]

52 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I do not know if that makes any difference to this example, but here it is anyway.

Thanks.

Your document has Bleed, but I don't think you understand how to use it properly. Your artwork needs to extend to the outer edge of the bleed, not to the edge of the canvas.

In the screenshot below I have placed a red line in the bleed area. The bleed line is the blue line at the left of screenshot. Your brush stroke should extend at least as far as that line.

Here is a screenshot showing use of the Bleed:

[William Overington]

On 3/3/2021 at 2:31 PM, walt.farrell said:

Thanks.

Your document has Bleed, but I don't think you understand how to use it properly. Your artwork needs to extend to the outer edge of the bleed, not to the edge of the canvas.

Hi Walt

Thank you for your reply.

Apart from reading it using a smartphone and thanking you  I have been off the net for over a fortnight because the wifi on my computer broke, and I needed to get a new computer and I am only fully back on the net today.

https://community.serif.com/discussion/116037/computer-problems

I hope to get back to the graphic art soon.

Best regards,

William

 

[William Overington]

Just for completeness, I managed to get the wifi on the computer fixed by downloading a new copy of the driver using the new computer, transferring it to this computer using a USB memory stick, then installing the new driver, then rebooting.

Installing the new driver was straightforward as it was in a .exe file that upon being run, did everything that was needed to be done.

This thread has been linked today from the following thread.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/143812-informal-design-workshop-idea/

William