transparent vs white background on processed images

[CarolM97]

Hi -- I'm very new to the world of design and Affinity Publisher. I'm self-publishing a children's picture book with watercolor illustrations by a professional illustrator. The images will be post-processed by a graphic designer (to ensure that colors are on-target and image backgrounds are either true-white or transparent -- whichever I deem necessary). I'm doing the layout and design in Publisher.

I don't know if this is the proper place to ask this question, but I thought I'd start here as everyone on this forum is so helpful. I'm trying to determine if I need to have the graphic designer do fully transparent backgrounds or if white backgrounds will work. (Transparent is much more time consuming and expensive processing for those illustrations which are vignettes or don't bleed to all edges.) What she said to me is that "If the background of your work page is really white (hexadecimal value # 000000) then you can avoid having the image with the transparent background."  She has sent me 2 examples of a vignette: one with transparent and one with white background. I can tell from the Color Picker tool that the white background in the PDF she sent me is exactly the same as the color of the Publisher page. 

But what I don't know is how this will translate in the printing process. (I simply haven't wrapped my brain around how it all plays out.) Will I see differences in the "white" where there's a white background on an image vs. where there's simply no image or text? I'll send the printer a PDF. I would think that "no color is no color" (and hence no ink) and that it would all look the same. But I DO NOT want any nasty surprises!

I do know that I need to make sure that the image layers won't interfere with each other.

Thoughts?

Thank you!!!

Carol

 

[Lee D]

Hi @CarolM97, usually most exported projects are exported out with a white background, unless the design requires it to be different colour. It is worth confirming with your printer as well, just in case as they may have some other file requirements that you need to know.

[ReneSt]

What I am needing is to be able to, save the file with a transparent background so I can use a projector to project it to a large board to create a sign.  Can this be done, and if so how do I do it?  Thanks in advance!

[Old Bruce]

4 minutes ago, ReneSt said:

save the file with a transparent background so I can use a projector to project it to a large board

Wouldn't you need a Black background for that? My mind says transparent would just let all the white light shine through. I have no experience with these modern projectors, just the old days hard copy type, so I could be really wrong here.

There is a check box for transparent background in the Document Set up, in the new document window in the Colour section and you can do the same with the existing document too. File > Document Setup... Colour section.