Producing an image that is the original image less the bleed areas

[William Overington]

I have some designs that I have produced for printing greetings cards. They are 2171 pixels by 1571 pixels at 300 dots per inch and I have both .afdesign files and .jpg files. The size is 7 inches by 5 inches with a 3 millimetre bleed area at edch edge.

I would now like to produce images 2100 pixels by 1500 pixels so as to illustrate in a publication the image on the resulting card. For example, by placing the image onto an A5 size page.

Is there a way in Affinity Designer to produce such an image by doing something such as adding a rectangle at x=35, y=35 with width and height 2000 and 1500 and then doing something, maybe called a crop or maybe called something else, please?

William

 

[Alfred]

Please refer to your previous thread about this:

 

[William Overington]

Oh! So I did.

I remember now, I had problems with it so gave up.

I never seem to do well with dragging and the like.

What i need is a tool to be clicked that recognises a selected rectangle as the outer limit and then puts everything inside it in the new image of the size of the rectangle and omits everything that is outside the rectangle. Like a crop but without the guesswork and artistic judging stuff, just straight using numbers in a panel.

I remember going back to ImpactPlus that there was all this stuff about dragging and sort of artistically judging and I could not get anywhere with it, but once I found out about putting numbers into the status panel I got good results easily.

So maybe the only way for me to get the results is to use Microsoft Paint and its properties panel.

William

 

[Alfred]

33 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I never seem to do well with dragging and the like.

Can you be a bit more specific? In my second post to the other thread (the very last post, at the time of writing this one) I mentioned dragging a group to the rectangle layer’s clipping position. Is that what you found difficult?

38 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Like a crop but without the guesswork and artistic judging stuff, just straight using numbers in a panel.

You’ve already used the W and H controls in the Transform panel to make the rectangle exactly 2100 pixels by 1500 pixels. If you haven’t already done so, use the X and Y controls to position it precisely, cut it to the clipboard and left-click on the group in the Layers panel. If you then paste the rectangle from the clipboard, it will be added immediately above the selected group in the layer stack. Right-click on the rectangle layer and choose ‘Mask to Below’ to crop the group to the rectangle shape.

[William Overington]

Well I just tried it, and I got to the 'Mask to Below' bit and it all disappeared, so I thought it was on the clipboard so I changed the document set up to 1500 pixels by 2100 pixels then pasted, but just got an empty rectangle.

Where have I gone wrong please?

One thing, when I drew the rectangle it was solid filled with colour so I changed the opacity to 0%. Was that the mistake?

William

 

[William Overington]

Well, I put the opacity to 100% and I got the 1500 by 2100 image with a white surround.

But I am not at present able to get it out as a jpg of 1500 by 2100 as trying to export the selection gives 1571 by 2171 as the size of the selection.

If I try to copy it to the clipboard and then paste back I just get the original filled with colour rectangle.

William

 

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

One thing, when I drew the rectangle it was solid filled with colour so I changed the opacity to 0%. Was that the mistake?

 

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

Well, I put the opacity to 100% and I got the 1500 by 2100 image with a white surround.

I think you have your answer!

 

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

trying to export the selection gives 1571 by 2171 as the size of the selection

You need to select the 2100 by 1500 rectangle and choose to export the selection area rather than the selected objects.

[William Overington]

15 minutes ago, Alfred said:

You need to select the 2100 by 1500 rectangle and choose to export the selection area rather than the selected objects.

As far as I can tell at present, I don't seem to have that option.

 

 

William

 

 

[Alfred]

22 minutes ago, Alfred said:

You need to select the 2100 by 1500 rectangle and choose to export the selection area rather than the selected objects.

 

5 minutes ago, William Overington said:

As far as I can tell at present, I don't seem to have that option.

My apologies, William. I posted without having the app in front of me.

Your screenshot shows the size when the ‘Whole document’ option is chosen. Don’t the dimensions change if you chose either of the other options? 

[William Overington]

3 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Your screenshot shows the size when the ‘Whole document’ option is chosen. Don’t the dimensions change if you chose either of the other options? 

The dimensions do not change.

William

 

[Alfred]

I’m getting inconsistent results with my tests here, but even when I try to crop/mask a group of vector objects with a smaller rectangle I never get export dimensions the same size as the rectangle. I think this is because cropping is non-destructive (so the parts beyond the bounds of the rectangle are retained to allow the operation to be reversed).

As far as I can see, you need to rasterize everything in order to be able to discard unwanted pixels.

[Alfred]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

I think this is because cropping is non-destructive (so the parts beyond the bounds of the rectangle are retained to allow the operation to be reversed).

Hmm. Re-reading that, unless you’re exporting to a vector format it doesn’t make any sense at all! If you’re exporting to JPEG, PNG, or TIFF you’re only going to have visible pixels in the output.

[William Overington]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

As far as I can see, you need to rasterize everything in order to be able to discard unwanted pixels.

Thank you for looking into this.

I have just tried opening the jpg that I used to order the greetings card, saved as a .afdesign file then tried the masking. The masking seems to work alright but the exporting still has the same problem, it still shops 1571 by 2171.

Is Microsoft Paint the only way to get the result that I need?

William

 

[William Overington]

5 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Is Microsoft Paint the only way to get the result that I need?

@Alfred

No, it is not!

I tried again, but first I tried

File

Personas

Pixel

and upon selecting

Selection with background

the size went to 1500 2100

Oh one does need a steady hand to change persona!

Though I think one needs to add the rectangle and select it before changing the persona.

William

 

 

 

 

[Alfred]

12 minutes ago, William Overington said:

and upon selecting

Selection with background [in the Pixel persona]

the size went to 1500 2100

Good news! Who woulda thunk exporting from a different persona would produce a different result?

18 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Oh one does need a steady hand to change persona!

Please see the following post:

 

[William Overington]

This morning I tried going back to the afdesign file that I had been using before I made an afdesign file that I had saved from opening a previously exported jpg file and saving that as an afdesign file.

I wondered if switching to pixel persona and then exporting would give the desired 1500 pixel by 2100 pixel jpg file.

It did not.

Yet I then found the

Layers

Rasterise...

command, but the dot dot dot bit did not seem to need anything doing. But if I highlighted the selected part it showed 1500 2100 when selecting the Selection with background option.

Still learning but it appears that I now have a way to export a 1500 2100 jpg without having to first make a 1571 2171 jpg and then open that jpg separately.

I did these tests on a copy of my original afdesign file of the poem so that I would not alter the original flle.

William