PDF Black Overprint "fixed" with extra Adjustment Layer

[Bryce]

I'm seeing the same thing you guys are.

Nowadays we don't have near as many people complaining since so much is printed composite digitally.

I hope this gets fixed. It wil also have to fix the PDF Passthrough engine too. Colors will change when exported again. There was a major overahaul to the color engine/spaces in export with 1.7 and it helped a lot, but there is another huge leap that needs to take place.

We have switched our printshop and newspaper over to Affinity, and for the most part, like it much better, but color issues still plague.

Studiolink is great but Slices need to be brought in so they're available.

[prophet]

Synthesizing my own discovery of the Adjustment layer forcing the overprint to remain black instead of converting to 4 color, along with @Dazmondo77's clever notion of grouping an object with itself to make the multiply work, plus @loukash's inspiring work ethic of exhaustive testing as seen in many, many threads, here's my viable workaround. It has the distinct advantage of keeping the drop show "live" with no need to rasterize anything or use "K only".

• Duplicate object needing outer shadow.
• Create outer shadow making sure to use 100 K (kind of ridiculous we have to double check this, but it's important)
• Optional step of unchecking "Fill knocks out shadow" and setting "Fill Opacity" to 0% (makes layer thumbnails reflect the workflow more accurately)
• Add Adjustment Level (No need to make any actual adjustments, just need the layer. I use Levels)
• Group shadowed object with itself and set the Group to Multiply
• Group shadowed object with the original so you can manipulate them together.

This works for Press Ready and X-4 PDFs

But it does not work with placed AFPhoto images (WTF?!?!)

It's been a heckuva ride and hopefully these hacks will all break soon in a new release that doesn't require them anymore.

[prophet]

On 8/16/2021 at 4:17 PM, prophet said:

Optional step of unchecking "Fill knocks out shadow"

I am rescinding the above recommendation as it creates some weird drop shadow issues.

[loukash]

13 hours ago, prophet said:

weird drop shadow issues

Could be related to this:

 

[rkdp]

Doing the same thing... exporting APub to PDF and getting light odd drop shadows. (6/25/2022 - Affinity 1.10... Windows 10.)

This has been a major issue for well over a year now - Is Affinity working on a solution???

[prophet]

A small "improvement" on this issue with 2.1.

It would appear one no longer needs to add an "empty" levels layer, make the image into a group of 1, and set that group to multiply.

Now you can merely duplicate the image, add the shadow to the image at the bottom, and set that image layer to multiply.

A bit simpler, but you know what would be even more simple?…I bet you do.

[prophet]

And for a spot color background, no "empty" Levels layer is needed, but one must still make the underlying image into a group of 1 and apply multiply to the group.

[loukash]

Still broken as of 2.2.0! 

[prophet]

Revisiting this old chestnut after several software cycles and it seems we've had a reversion.

To have a black drop shadow correctly overprint on a spot color background, one must include the extraneous Adjustment layer as outlined in my August 16, 2021 post.

[loukash]

On the other hand, digital drop shadows are ugly and are being massively overused, so…