Affinity Photo Printing

[rodyo]

I am thinking of using Affinity Photo instead of my old version of Photoshop. However, I do print much of my work and my experiences so far have not been good. I soft proofed my photo and downsized it to leave a blank border.I adjusted the photo after making a soft proof layer which I then switched off (why, I don't know but I followed the Lenscraft guide). I set the profile in the Print dialogue, chose correct printer and selected size defined by driver. Colour management was set to be performed by app. The print was dull and washed out and it was not centred on the page. Printed the same image form Photoshop (it was a Tiff) and it came out centred and looking pretty much as it appeared on screen.

I can't find any good instructions on the printing process (apart form the one I mentioned) or a video tutorial. If I can't print photos accurately then Affinity Photo is of no use to me and I'll revert back to my old software. Despite its overall complexity the Print process is much easier in Photoshop.

I would be grateful for suggestions and any directions to a useful guide.

Thanks

 

Rod

[Dan C]

Hi @rodyo,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums

Unfortunately we don't have an official printing guide in Affinity, due to the wide rage of documents, colour spaces, printers and printing material. We do however have a Spotlight article which I've linked below, which explains the most common printing concepts -

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/designing-for-professional-printing/

I also recommend checking out the following third party tutorial on youtube for how to setup documents for printing -

In regards to the issues you've experienced, can you please try exporting to PDF from the Affinity app using the PDF (for print) preset, and then print this PDF externally - is this now printed as expected for you?

Many thanks in advance!

[BofG]

On 9/30/2021 at 4:19 PM, rodyo said:

I would be grateful for suggestions and any directions to a useful guide.

If you genuinely care about the quality of the output, then don't print directly from Affinity. It doesn't do anything special (unlike say Adobe which has it's own print engine), the colour profile support is patchy, borderless printing is broken (fixed yet? Maybe, I don't know for sure) and even if it did work now they are great at introducing bugs often.

PDF > Adobe Reader (which is free) and you'll get better results. (Or use Photoshop if you still have it).

[Alfred]

8 minutes ago, BofG said:

PDF > Adobe Reader (which is free) and you'll get better results.

What’s more, Adobe Reader will show you exactly what you’re going to get (as long as print scaling is set to 100%) so you can avoid wasting expensive ink/toner and paper.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, BofG said:

PDF > Adobe Reader (which is free) and you'll get better results.

Anybody know if Adobe Acrobat Reader DC for Mac installs a bunch of support files all over the startup drive like some of the other, older Adobe apps used to do?

At times, that 'extra' payload caused problems with some of my other apps & it took forever to sort out & remove the offending items.

[rodyo]

I'm quite stunned by this - a photo editing program that can't output to a photo properly! This is a severe failing and, to be honest, has made me think that there is no point in investing time and effort in learning how to use this program. It's back to Photoshop for me.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, rodyo said:

I'm quite stunned by this - a photo editing program that can't output to a photo properly!

I do not know how it works in the Windows versions, but in the Mac ones the Affinity apps use only the print functions provided by the macOS. A consequence of this is the print options are dependent on the print drivers & other supporting software installed, which vary enormously depending on the printer make & model.

Unfortunately, this means that for Macs just finding the right place in the print dialog to set the color management options could be a challenge since it might appear in different popup menus for different printers.

[Wosven]

6 hours ago, R C-R said:

I do not know how it works in the Windows versions, but in the Mac ones the Affinity apps use only the print functions provided by the macOS. A consequence of this is the print options are dependent on the print drivers & other supporting software installed, which vary enormously depending on the printer make & model.

Unfortunately, this means that for Macs just finding the right place in the print dialog to set the color management options could be a challenge since it might appear in different popup menus for different printers.

It's the same for Windows, and a new printer is always a difficult time to learn again where are the options and sometimes needing to click twice more to get the same results...

[BofG]

9 hours ago, rodyo said:

I'm quite stunned by this - a photo editing program that can't output to a photo properly! This is a severe failing and, to be honest, has made me think that there is no point in investing time and effort in learning how to use this program. It's back to Photoshop for me.

To put things into context, the cheapest RIP I could find for my printer was around £800, if I had continued to rent Adobe's software for the time I've been using Affinity it wouldn't be far short of that figure.

You are not going to get a super fandango RIP built into sub £50 software.

[Old Bruce]

19 hours ago, R C-R said:

Anybody know if Adobe Acrobat Reader DC for Mac installs a bunch of support files all over the startup drive like some of the other, older Adobe apps used to do?

At times, that 'extra' payload caused problems with some of my other apps & it took forever to sort out & remove the offending items.

Just going from memory here but if we are talking about the free version then it installed the reader alone. No extra files . That was a couple of years back but I doubt there has been a change.

[rodyo]

6 hours ago, BofG said:

To put things into context, the cheapest RIP I could find for my printer was around £800, if I had continued to rent Adobe's software for the time I've been using Affinity it wouldn't be far short of that figure.

You are not going to get a super fandango RIP built into sub £50 software.

Well I do have Qimage which certainly doesn't cost £800 and I can certainly get good results with that with my Canon Pro 10S.  I was expecting photo editing software   that would allow me to get satisfactory print results. and before buying Affinity Photo, the workbook and spending many hours learning the program I was not m de aware of any printing  limitations from any review or promotion. Perhaps I should have suspected something was up when I could find no tutorials or detailed guides for this aspect of workflow.

I have to print quite a bit for a course I'm doing. I need software that will take me to that point - it seems that Affinity Photo falls short.

[R C-R]

28 minutes ago, rodyo said:

Perhaps I should have suspected something was up when I could find no tutorials or detailed guides for this aspect of workflow.

As has been mentioned, this is because it is different for just about every make & model of printer that relies on the OS to support printing. The usual (& not always very helpful) advice is to consult the printer's user manual or ask for help from the printer maker's support site.

[rodyo]

So is this the case with all photo editing software apart from Adobe and Qimage?  I was not expecting detailed advice from Affinity on how to handle one of the more popular semi-professional printer - I do understand the driver settings required for printing with the aforementioned programs. What I was hoping for was some explanation of the settings that are available in Affinity Photo's print dialogue.

[BofG]

50 minutes ago, rodyo said:

Well I do have Qimage which certainly doesn't cost £800 and I can certainly get good results with that with my Canon Pro 10S.  I was expecting photo editing software   that would allow me to get satisfactory print results. and before buying Affinity Photo, the workbook and spending many hours learning the program I was not m de aware of any printing  limitations from any review or promotion. Perhaps I should have suspected something was up when I could find no tutorials or detailed guides for this aspect of workflow.

I have to print quite a bit for a course I'm doing. I need software that will take me to that point - it seems that Affinity Photo falls short.

You can print from Photo, if you use only rgb profiles it generally works. There are bugs, it's not the absolute best quality but it does at a basic level function.

If you have other software such as QImage then why not make the most of it? You don't have to use one tool for the whole job.

[rodyo]

Just wish I'd known about this before buying the program and spending time learning it. It seems such a basic requirement of photo editing software. Oh well, live and learn

[BofG]

5 minutes ago, rodyo said:

Just wish I'd known about this before buying the program and spending time learning it. It seems such a basic requirement of photo editing software. Oh well, live and learn

Which then begs the question why does software like QImage exist?

From reading between the lines of the marketing and what staff here have said, the suite is intended to produce the print ready artwork, not to actually print it at a professional level.

[rodyo]

I You are wide of the mark there. Qimage is dedicated to printing - it is not a fully fledged photo editing program, though it can help with a range of general adjustments like exposure, contrast, sharpness etc. It does not do targeted local adjustments. I have used it for image placement, particularly when printing booklets. I would suggest that for an affinity Photo user it is probably essential for rpinting - it does what Affinity Photo obviously doesn't.

[R C-R]

27 minutes ago, rodyo said:

What I was hoping for was some explanation of the settings that are available in Affinity Photo's print dialogue.

Again, I don't know how it is for Windows but for Macs, the available settings & where to find them vary tremendously depending on the specific printer make & model. This has been true for many years, long before the Affinity apps were released. Over the years I have only used a few color printers with my Macs but every one of them put the choices for color management in a different part of the print dialog. Worse, when a new macOS version was released, some of the options changed or no longer worked at all.

[BofG]

7 minutes ago, rodyo said:

I You are wide of the mark there. Qimage is dedicated to printing - it is not a fully fledged photo editing program, though it can help with a range of general adjustments like exposure, contrast, sharpness etc. It does not do targeted local adjustments. I have used it for image placement, particularly when printing booklets. I would suggest that for an affinity Photo user it is probably essential for rpinting - it does what Affinity Photo obviously doesn't.

You misunderstood, my point is if every graphic manipulation software is "supposed" to print like Pro software does, there would be no market at all for standalone software that purely does printing.

 

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I don't know how it is for Windows

It's mostly the same - the print driver handles it all through it's own proprietary UI. The driver programmers are seemingly in competition with one another to make the worst UI possible.

Colour management is a bit different, you can choose to have the app manage it (e.g. Photo does the ICC conversions), the driver manage it or you can run it through Windows colour management. It can all get a bit ambiguous when the driver doesn't have an option to disable it's own colour management.

[Old Bruce]

3 minutes ago, BofG said:

The driver programmers are seemingly in competition with one another to make the worst UI possible.

I think they all own shares in all the Toner/Ink companies (Mines? Farms? Ranches? I stopped paying attention to where inks came from years back). Everyone has printed out more copies than we wanted to.

[R C-R]

6 minutes ago, BofG said:

The driver programmers are seemingly in competition with one another to make the worst UI possible.

That seems like a good way to describe it seems on every Mac I have ever used.

However, the newest wrinkle on the Mac side is AirPrint, described by some as a 'driverless' printer protocol. It works OK with the only printer I have that supports AirPrint, but it is a B&W laser printer so I have no idea how well it would work for color management.

[rodyo]

18 minutes ago, BofG said:

You misunderstood, my point is if every graphic manipulation software is "supposed" to print like Pro software does, there would be no market at all for standalone software that purely does printing.

 

[rodyo]

See above quote.

 

It's more to do with layout options. Also purge scheduling makes it very useful for printers. Anyway, there is an obvious a market - for owners of Affinity Photo which by your implication is not Pro  standard for printing at least.

[v_kyr]

Printing via Affinity software simply just offers what the common OS related printing APIs and a printer manufactor drivers do provide here, nothing more. As does most low cost image/graphics software. - For more advanced printing capabilities you have to use third party software (like DDi's QImage for WIN etc. which you seem to have). - Software related things like Adobe PS do play feature wise in another league here, but well of course also price wise!

In the past on WIN systems I used from ddi the Qimage & Profile Prism combo, in order to prepare images for printouts. Results were quite good those days on Canon printers.

[LondonSquirrel]

53 minutes ago, rodyo said:

See above quote.

 

It's more to do with layout options. Also purge scheduling makes it very useful for printers. Anyway, there is an obvious a market - for owners of Affinity Photo which by your implication is not Pro  standard for printing at least.

Not wishing to nitpick, but the Qimage web site states this: 'Qimage Ultimate is high quality photo print nesting software for PC/Windows
See below for suggested workflows when printing stand-alone, or printing directly from Photoshop, Lightroom, and Elements'.

Presumably the Qimage company considers the built-in printing tools in Photoshop and Lightroom are not good enough, and presumably that is where they find most of their customers.

I don't see a problem with having a separate tool to handle printing as it is such a complex task. Isn't that the reason why there are books devoted to printing digitally? I have a couple...