Affinity Photo applying brightness/contrast adjustment to transparent areas?

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Hi,

I have a Publisher document that has a Affinity Photo document placed within it.  During development, everything looked fine, but when I exported the Publisher document as a PDF, I noticed that the transparent portion of the Affinity Photo image was darker than the surrounding background of a lower Publisher layer.  I did some investigation and found that when an Affinity Photo document is placed into a Publisher document that the effects of a brightness/contrast adjustment layer in the Affinity Photo document seem to be applied to the transparent portions of the Photo document.  If I export the Photo document as a TIFF file and place the TIFF image into the Publisher document, then the PDF exported from Publisher is fine.  I've attached simple files that can reproduce the problem.  Is this a bug, or am I misunderstanding something about how brightness/contrast adjustment layers affect transparent image areas?

Thanks,

Ken

 

Background Color Inconsistency Problem.afpub Background Color Inconsistency Problem.pdf RedTextTransparentBackground.afphoto RedTextTransparentBackground.tiff

[Wosven]

There's certainly bugs... that's why I'd rather export using PDF X-1a to avoid such problems.

I used a recolor adjustement, to be sure, if it was modifying the backround, to be able to see some evidence...

PDF for print using PDF 1.7:

Background Color Inconsistency ProblemForPrint.pdf

 

PDF/X:

Background Color Inconsistency Problem_PDFX.pdf

 

Background Color Inconsistency Problem_PDFX.pdf Background Color Inconsistency ProblemForPrint.pdf

[Wosven]

On further inspection, nothing happens with your adjustement in the AP file (same red with or without), and in the end we've got real text in the different PDF, 1.7 or PDF/X.

For the TIFF file, the text is rasterised, but there's no difference between the backgroung blue, but around the text, like a darker stroke, in the PDF 1.7 version.

 

To sumarise: transparency in PDF/X is correctly flattened and the details and background are correct.

It's completely different with other PDF versions.

[Ken Hjulstrom]

Thank you both!  The actual image that I was working with contains very stylized title text for which I haven't yet found the digital typeface, so I don't have to worry so much about degradation of text.  As it turns out, the production printing of the magazine I was working on wouldn't have suffered, since the PDF export presets that I use for the print-ready version is set to export to PDF/X4.  I ran into this problem when using the default "PDF (digital - small size)" preset to generate a smaller-sized preliminary version to send to the editor for review.  I'll set up some project-specific versions of these default Publisher PDF export presets to use PDF/X, which should prevent this from happening again.

Thanks again,

Ken