Artwork export - High Quality PDF is showing pixelated/blurry

[Beck]

Hey guys!

When i export my artwork to a High Quality PDF - parts of it go blurry and pixelated. 

The entire artwork is created with Curves which show crisp and clean when opened in Affinity Designer and I am wanting to export this as a HQ PDF for large print use. 

For some reason, my partner designer who uses illustrator and supply the entire artwork in clean curves but for some reason, I cannot do the same with Affinity. 

I have attached the HQ PDF - you will see alot of the dark green leaves in the tree are blurry and pixelated when zoomed. 

Any suggestions?

thanks! 

[MCKINLAY] Logo Design (HQ PDF).pdf

[Joachim_L]

3 minutes ago, Beck said:

Any suggestions?

Are you using FX or adjustments on part of your design? That would explain the rasterizing. Could you share your .afdesign file here?

[Beck]

Hey!

Sorry i'm not quite familiar with the term FX but checking over the artwork, there are no Adjustments on the elements. Looks like it's plain curves with fill colour. Maybe i am missing something or could this be a bug?

I have attached the design file here

thanks! 

[MCKINLAY] Logo Design.afdesign

[Joachim_L]

7 hours ago, Beck said:

Maybe i am missing something or could this be a bug?

First of all, I absolutely admire the hard work you were putting into your design. Second there were two tiny bits preventing your design being all vector. One I could explain, the other one I am not sure about.

1. The boy's necktie(?) has a mask, which will be raster anyway. See attached image.

2. The girl's ribbon(?) has a group with the blend mode Passthrough. Try to avoid it. But why it is rasterising is a mystery to me, as I am pretty sure there were other areas with blend mode Passthrough.

Work around both issues and you'll get an all vector PDF. An indicator if a vector only design has problems, is the warning Some areas will be rasterised in the export dialogue.

HTH

[Beck]

Hey Joachim_L!

Thanks for your kind words!

And thanks so much for the info. I had no idea that these little elements would affect the entire design when exported. I had deleted these 2 x elements you mentioned above and unfortunately the artwork is still exporting pixelated. Maybe there is a lot more of these in the design - do you know a faster way on how we can find these without having to manually search through every layer? 

Majority of this design was created in illustrator and only having this trouble when opening in Affinity to Export as High Quality PDF. Maybe Affinity for some reason is having trouble reading some of the design elements. 

 

thanks! 

 

[Old Bruce]

6 minutes ago, Beck said:

Majority of this design was created in illustrator  ... Affinity for some reason is having trouble reading some of the design elements. 

Yes, there are so many problems caused by applications trying to read and correctly interpret the various proprietary methods of drawing to screen and or paper plus all the different ways of rendering formulae.

[Beck]

Hey guys! I posted to Affinity incase this was a bug and they have resolved my issue. Such an easy fix
Here it is incase anyone has the same problem: 

Quote

The PDF - digital high quality preset has 'Allow advanced features' intentionally disabled. Your document appears to contain lots of groups with an Opacity of less than 100%. I believe Transparency is considered an 'Advanced Feature' and so with that disabled these groups will get rasterised.

Enabling that option will still send pretty much everything out as vector and look correct (Alternatively you could try the PDF for Print preset) 

 

[lacerto]

(...)

[Beck]

Hey everyone! Just a quick question on this. Is there a work around having elements export crisp when they have FX applied? 

Or if elements have FX applied, are these automatically rasterized which in turn, when exporting as PDF they will come out pixelated?