Expand Brush Stroke

[pastroboy]

13 hours ago, MEB said:

Hi Mateprsk,
I certainly understand your frustration for the lacking of "pure" vector brushes in the current version but that comparison is not quite right. All software is sold as is, that is, users purchase what's included in the software package as described in the product page. If it fulfils their needs then everything is fine, if not they can get a refund and select/move on to something else. In most cases there's also a trial available for them to try (currently 90 days/usually 10 days in our case) to check whether it does what they want or not. The software is complete and sold as is. If it "lacks" some features the user wanted then it probably wasn't the right choice in first place. So a fairer comparison would be a user buying a regular bicycle and later realise the model he bought doesn't include gears because he didn't check at the time or did not realise their importance for what we wanted to do with it. No software includes everything from the start - otherwise it would never be released - it requires several cycles of development/versions to become more capable/efficient over time. If the users keep seeing value in it and in its development they can upgrade to newer versions if they wish.

Hi MEB, for the most part that's correct, but I think the issue has a layer here worth noting. 

First of all, I love Affinity, the innovation and value is first-rate, I'm active promoter of switching to Affinity from competing apps whenever possible. This issue is not enough to make me jump ship. And I appreciate the positive discussion here. 

But I think thread highlights a subtle marketing liberties taken which are likely to mislead buyers and slow Affinity's progress potentially. And the issue is "selling as is" vs assumed industry terms and standards. 

For example the Affinity Designer product page (https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/) promotes a "full featured vector workspace", adding "grain to your crisp vectors", "true creative freedom", "comprehensive vector toolset", etc. My concern here, just like  Mateprsk, is that apples = apples, i.e.  it sounds very much like its the same as the competing, industry standard vector app, which includes brushes panels with true vector brushes, etc. One wouldn't guess any significant shortfall on a "full feature". Using the descriptors above in relation to Designer's brushes is slightly misleading, IMO. (Even though the term "raster brush" is mentioned, the overall impression of the paragraph if about an added capability, not a underdeveloped feature. I understand the need to highlight the strengths of the package (which we all love) but "full featured vector app" doesn't seem right without this aspect. Until Designer is a legitimate alternative to the industry standard for brush functions, avoid that ambiguity). 

Maybe a solution is to have raster brushes in a separate panel to vector ones, which is where the misunderstanding is, and slightly edit the wording on the product page to remove brush features ambiguity. Either way, keep up the good work.

[richbyte]

IMAGE TRACING + Expand Image and Texture Category Brushes For Affinity Designer

Hello everyone,

You may not know but Inkscape just released v1.0 version today ( including native Mac version). 

This is an example of how we can use Inkscape to fill the gap of 2 functions we need in Affinity Designer for the time being:

1. Tracing Bitmaps -> Trace Bitmap in Inkscape + Save as SVG and edit in Affinity Designer

2. Expand Image and Texture Category Brushes -> Export Affinity Designer object as PNG which has a texture brush  + Open the PNG in Inkscape + Trace Bitmap + Save SVG + Edit in Affinity Designer.

I am not sure how it will work with complex brushes but I tried few and I am very happy with the results.

Please find the attached files which explain the above.

Hopefully this will help you get finer output in print and give you more confidence in using texture brushes in Affinity Designer for your professional work.

 

All the best,

G

@gauravsarinarts

 

 

 

artboards.afdesign 4.svg 3.svg 2.svg 1.svg

Edited May 5, 2020 by richbyte

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, richbyte said:

You may not know but Inkscape just released v1.0 version today ( including native Mac version). 

FWIW, for the Mac it is still a preview version, with the following disclaimer:

Quote

We are aware of many issues and inconveniences with this preview of Inkscape for macOS, most notably performance. 

Also, I have tried with 3 different Mac browsers to start the download of the DMG file & although in each of them I get a "Download Started" indicator, the download never actually begins. ☹️

I may try again in a few days but frankly, if it is not a huge improvement over the Mac RC1 version I already have, it won't be worth the effort. Not only is the overall performance of that RC version abysmal (many simple operations take 20-30 seconds to complete) it still basically seems to be a Windows port, just with added support for Mac keyboard shortcuts & a Mac style main menu.

I would love to be proved wrong, but I suspect it will be years before we see anything close to a high performance, native code Mac version of Inkscape. <sigh>

[richbyte]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

FWIW, for the Mac it is still a preview version, with the following disclaimer:

Also, I have tried with 3 different Mac browsers to start the download of the DMG file & although in each of them I get a "Download Started" indicator, the download never actually begins. ☹️

I may try again in a few days but frankly, if it is not a huge improvement over the Mac RC1 version I already have, it won't be worth the effort. Not only is the overall performance of that RC version abysmal (many simple operations take 20-30 seconds to complete) it still basically seems to be a Windows port, just with added support for Mac keyboard shortcuts & a Mac style main menu.

I would love to be proved wrong, but I suspect it will be years before we see anything close to a high performance, native code Mac version of Inkscape. <sigh>

Hi R C-R,

Thanks for your feedback. I am not interested in Inkscape for vector work and was just interested to see if I can get good vectorization of the texture brushes through its Trace Image function. I downloaded the Mac version today from the Inkscape site only to test this out. I created the attached files with it to see how it fits my Affinity Designer workflow. It seemed to work for me.  Affinity designer is my go to vector app and I don't see myself switching to Inkscape, you may be right about the future Mac version availability of Inkscape.

What I posted was something which people who use raster brushes in Affinity Designer and come across issues in print quality, may find useful. 

Thanks.

[ronanski]

How did you get inkscape on a mac? I was under the impression they ceased to support inkscape since the last mac update to catalina as it no longer supports 32 bit apps and although it states the newest version of inkscape is 64bit it is not. I downloaded it and it stated it was 32bit and wouldnt work on a mac.

[R C-R]

35 minutes ago, ronanski said:

How did you get inkscape on a mac? I was under the impression they ceased to support inkscape since the last mac update to catalina as it no longer supports 32 bit apps and although it states the newest version of inkscape is 64bit it is not. I downloaded it and it stated it was 32bit and wouldnt work on a mac.

If you go to https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.0/ you should find a link to what should (but did not for me until a few minutes ago) download a DMG file usable with macOS 10.11 through 10.15.

It should run for you on your Mac, but pay attention to the notice at the bottom of the download page about it being a preview release with "many issues and inconveniences" for macOS users, most notably for its performance. At least for me that translates into an app that is so painfully slow to respond to most user input that it is almost unusable.

Maybe your luck will be better.

[Kdiver25]

Hi, I have imported some vector brushes and have created a document for printing But have been told that the ‘white’ area has to be transparent rather than white as it is being printed on white. The white area in the coloured areas are strokes. In have tried expanding the stroke and also changing it to no colour but it just goes black rather than transparent and the expand does not work (presumably from reading above because it is not a true vector brush). Can anyone let me know if it is possible to make the white area in here transparent? Thanks

[firstdefence]

@Kdiver25 In Affinity Designer it would be difficult to select the white but if you have access to Affinity Photo (If not download the trial - it’s fully functional for I think 90 days) and a snip at £25 you can use the erase white paper filter but I’m not a fan of that filter because it also turns solid colour a bit translucent. You can also use the Flood Select Tool in Affinity Photo and turn off contiguous to select all the white in the image, just click and drag on a bit of white in the image.

You can bounce between Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo using File > Edit in Photo and visa versa.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, Kdiver25 said:

Can anyone let me know if it is possible to make the white area in here transparent?

 

[Kdiver25]

@firstdefence thanks, I do have affinity photo however it would probably cause me a problem if the other colours became more translucent for printing purposes

[Marinaa]

I was having an identical issue to Kdiver25, and realized that you can set the blend mode to "erase". It will create a transparent cutout in the shape below it. It works just like the "subtract" function that most people are used to, but it's even more convenient because it's non-destructive. This still doesn't help if you are required to expand all strokes for publishing, though.

 =>  => 

 

Although the above worked for me in this case, I also had to find a workaround for a different part of my project because I couldn't expand a brush stroke, nor create a custom true vector brush. I would consider that a pretty essential feature in a professional workflow, and I look forward to seeing it eventually implemented.

[plam.mi]

On 7/15/2020 at 8:56 PM, Marinaa said:

This still doesn't help if you are required to expand all strokes for publishing, though.

This got me thinking, if working in Publisher will maybe help with things displaying correctly? I know you can can place / incorporate AFDSGNR files into all of the programs and Publisher does have a package function, which will, well, package everything into a bundle? Unless, of course it breaks when opening on another PC. If @MEB or another MOD could let us know?

It's another story when prepping large scale files (think big posters etc.) for print - the only thing that I found was rasterizing the brush as an image, but that is ... well bad. I'm hesitant to do this as I don't want my clients getting a surprise quality.

[MEB]

Hi @plam.mi,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Placing .afdesign files into an Affinity Publisher document will not change things here because currently all brushes used in Affinity Designer (except two) rely on raster based textures which are then repeated or stretched along the vector path (depending on the brush settings). That's the reason why you can't expand them - they are not truly vector based. You have nothing to win from rasterising a vector path with a (raster) brush applied because the texture that compose the brush is already based on raster data, if anything you end up losing the ability to edit the path itself since the whole brush stroke has been converted into a image.

We hope to improve the vector brush engine at some point to also be able to deal with brushes/textures formed by true vector objects.

[woefi]

18 minutes ago, MEB said:

We hope to improve the vector brush engine at some point to also be able to deal with brushes/textures formed by true vector objects.

Hi, @MEB, this would be wonderful!
Any hints when we can expect this to be added? 🥺

[plam.mi]

43 minutes ago, MEB said:

That's the reason why you can't expand them

OK, so then how do I prep a file for print? I will most likely be sending an EPS format to the client as a more universal option and I want to make sure nothing breaks when it is opened on the other computer.

Thank you for the quick and detailed explanation and for the welcomes

[MEB]

Hi @plam.mi,
If it's for commercial printing you will probably use/export to PDF (EPS is a bit outdated/more limited), but apart from that why do you think the current brushes will break something? They may not be as much sharper as true vector brushes but it doesn't mean they will not be exported/printed correctly.

@woefi
Please do not take it for granted. There's plans to (eventually) expand the vector brush engine but it's not coming in the short/medium term.

[plam.mi]

1 minute ago, MEB said:

but apart from that why do you think the current brushes will break something?

My thought process was that I don't know what programs the print shop will be working with, and if they use Illustrator, or Corel for example, I would like to ensure they can open a file with the Affinity brush applied and will see exactly the same thing that I designed.

I guess I never thought about the EPS being outdated, it is such a common file that is shared with me, and shared by me. But as per your advise, I will export in PDF.

[alunantu]

I bought and used Affinity suite 1.0. I bought and use Affinity suite 2.0. 

This thread is 7+ years old yet the response is that true vector brushes are going to be implemented "in the future, but not the short/medium term".

It's hilarious, yet so very frustrating that even after 2 paid overhauls of the apps, this literally basic function which is so misleadingly named is glossed over. 

The pixel persona is more powerful than the vector one in Designer (1 & 2) lol