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Stock Images-EPS-File is Pixelated


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Hello,

 

I just download the free trial for Affinity Designer. I work with a lot of stock artwork, and most of the files are EPS. When I open any EPS in AD, the images are horribly pixelated. Is there a work-around? I'm so tired of Creative Cloud and the total inability to get tech support. Really hoping I can find an alternative!

 

Cheri

:D

 

post-23948-0-03541100-1450421839_thumb.png

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  • Staff

Hi Cheri,

 

Is there any way you could share the file with us? Without seeing the file it's really hard to give advice because we don't know what's actually inside the file - it could be that what you're seeing is the whole thing and we won't know unless we can see the file for ourselves. You can send it to support@seriflabs.com if you'd prefer to keep the file private and we'll delete it after giving you advice. It's entirely possible that the stock artwork is saved as a very low quality 'Illustrator EPS' which means it will have a terrible quality EPS file (low resolution image like you're seeing) but the 'Illustrator' part of that means that it also contains a full Illustrator file embedded inside it. We can't read the embedded Illustrator document inside an EPS file and if this is the case then there is no easy workaround, I'm afraid to say :(  People create 'Illustrator EPS' files thinking "It's an EPS file so is openable in all software" which it is - but it's actually an Illustrator file placed inside a not-necessarily-very-good-quality EPS file. If you open it in Illustrator you get the impression the whole thing was there and it all worked brilliantly, but it's actually a bit of a lie... :(

 

Thanks,

Matt

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  • 2 years later...

Sorry to re-open this but I also have the very same problem. Trying to use some stock files and the first two eps files are terrible, with really jaggy images :(

 

I have tried speaking to them and they just say to use adobe illustrator, which i thought I'd just got away from after many years! I'm afraid this sort of thing tends to be a deal breaker, as i LOVE infinity designer but now it seems I need to have illustrator also.

 

Is there a possibility of this being fixed?

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3 hours ago, LeeColarelli said:

Sorry to re-open this but I also have the very same problem. Trying to use some stock files and the first two eps files are terrible, with really jaggy images :(

 

I have tried speaking to them and they just say to use adobe illustrator, which i thought I'd just got away from after many years! I'm afraid this sort of thing tends to be a deal breaker, as i LOVE infinity designer but now it seems I need to have illustrator also.

 

Is there a possibility of this being fixed?

Jaggy Images!! are you opening the jpg that normally comes with an eps file to show a preview of the EPS file?

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This is a screenshot of an eps file I have just downloaded from Freepik It is zoomed to 1000%

 

5a9edcbe77581_ScreenShot2.thumb.png.fdad0f85e38aceda5ed00f193df0ccef.png

 

98994-OLGXJI-850.eps

 

 

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57 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

Jaggy Images!! are you opening the jpg that normally comes with an eps file to show a preview of the EPS file?

 

Sorry but I find your reply slightly condescending. I have been doing graphic design for nearly 20 years.

 

Your freepik file has no jaggies because it is pure vector paths. It would never have any jaggies. 

 

However, some eps files have small images as part of the structure, and Affinity Designer does not do a good job with these. Today I have worked with three stock files from shutterstock, and all of them have extreme jaggies when opened with Affinity Designer but no jaggies when opened with Adobe Illustrator. 

 

Maybe you you should try yourself before attempting to educate someone else?

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Knock yourself out and take it anyway you wish my friend, I made the suggestion because people have made this mistake when they have had no file extension showing. Not knowing what type of EPS nor its contents had me at a slight disadvantage and I thought it best to get the simple things out of the way first.

 

 

 

 

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  • 1 month later...

I had the same pixelated issue with a .eps file I downloaded from Shutterstock.

 

I had a colleague open it in his Adobe Illustrator app and he converted it to the standard .ai file format. It was no longer pixelated but it turned out the vector file wasn't completely 'vector'. A tonne of shapes was not converted to paths or in Designer lingo, curves. I also found grouped and masked elements. 

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  • Staff

Hi sirpsychosexy,

EPS files created in Adobe Illustrator (sold on stock sites) have an embedded Ai file which is what Illustrator loads when it opens the file (thus keeping everything editable). Affinity apps are only able to access the EPS data itself (the AI data is proprietary/closed) and as such we are limited to load what the EPS data provides/support. For Ai files, Affinity can only import them if they include the PDF stream (the Create Compatible PDF File option when saving the Ai file in Illustrator) for the same reasons (we cannot access the proprietary Ai data).

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  • 7 months later...

Is there any advice on how to solve this for those of us who aren't experienced designers? I've just downloaded a vector eps 10 file from iStockphoto and have got the same issue - lines which were smooth are now jagged. So an image of the sun now looks jagged, for example. I'd tried opening it in Designer, Photo and Publisher before finding this thread. I have downloaded it as a jpeg for now, but now have to try and remove some unwanted text from it when that would have been really simple working on the vector file. I've attached what I'm dealing with: the first attachment is the jpeg downloaded from iStockphoto and the second is what I see in any of my Affinity programs.

If anyone can give me advice on this I'd be really grateful.

iStock-1051278648.jpg

iStock-1051278648.jpg

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52 minutes ago, AugustaMB said:

If anyone can give me advice on this I'd be really grateful.

From what @MEB said 8 months ago, in the post directly above yours, I think the answer is that those eps files are incompatible with the Affinity products as the files were not saved with the compatibility option enabled.

-- Walt
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2 minutes ago, AugustaMB said:

... - wish I'd known that before buying the file. This is the first thing I've found where the Affinity products don't work as well - and understand entirely it's down to the Ai software being proprietary.

Try opening the file in the free InkScape. It may open it properly and if so, export as an SVG (same applies if you have Illustrator).

Issues are usually related to EPS files cannot have transparency or transparency effects (like drop shadows, etc.) or meshes (both coloring and warping). As mentioned, an embedded AI file obviates the EPS file format limitations if an EPS also contains the AI portion. Remove the AI embedded portion of the file and AI will open such an EPS pretty much exactly like AD does.

Mike

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  • 1 year later...
  • Staff

Hi Evren,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
No, no action is being taken regarding this. EPS files are quite old now and have some limitations on their own - no support for blend modes, any kind of transparencies etc. Illustrator is able to save EPS with that functionality because it embeds Ai file data is the EPS which is what it uses to load the file again and keep everything editable - that's why stock sites require "Illustrator compatible" EPS files. This is proprietary data we do not have access to (we are limited to the standard EPS data) and so we can't do the same. It's unlikely there will be changes here unless stock sites also provide support for more file formats - SVG, PDF etc (some do).

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 5/18/2020 at 3:08 AM, MEB said:

 Illustrator ... embeds Ai file data ... This is proprietary data we do not have access to (we are limited to the standard EPS data) and so we can't do the same.

—With this being the case, why does copy/pasting an object from Adobe Illustrator into Affinity Designer (mostly) work?

My experience:

Tried opening an EPS file from iStock. The illustration is of multiple items on a desk. Affinity turned some parts of the image into bitmap. Also, the whole layer organization became a total disorganized mess when opened in Affinity.

But, inside of Adobe Illustrator (free trial), I selected a group (illustration of eyeglasses), copied it (Command-C), and pasted it into Affinity.

It worked! 

The one difference I notice between the eyeglasses opened in AI versus the eyeglasses copy/pasted into Affinity:

There is a shadow on the eyeglasses, which was created with multiple copies of the eyeglass frames, where each shadow-copy of the frame is shifted a little bit, and each copy is successively lighter in color—the look is akin to opening a book which makes the pages slightly stick out one from each other—only the pages get darker in color from one page to the next. Also, these shadow-objects each have a transparency of 50% inside of Ai. However—and this is the difference—when copy/pasted into Affinity, the transparency in these shadow-objects becomes 100% opaque.

In contrast, the lens of the eyeglasses retains transparency when copy/pasted into Affinity.

If copy/pasting works (mostly), why is Affinity not able to open the file (mostly) correctly? 

 

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1 hour ago, D-Heywood said:

If copy/pasting works (mostly), why is Affinity not able to open the file (mostly) correctly? 

Application wide copy/paste is a system service, meaning here that it's something the operating systems programming APIs have predefined and offer to hook on and reuse. - Opening a specific file in some well known and defined, or unknown, or more proprietary (vector/binary) format is different from that, since you have to parse and interpret the contents of that file in some more or less specific way.

So for example no other software can really deal with the specific Affinity format files, beside maybe showing up an embedded thumb nail image preview of those. Similar most other apps struggle to deal correctly with several Adobe file formats (Ai, EPS, PSD). - Beside that, even well specified and defined file formats like for example SVG aren't handled everywhere equally, some apps (like webbrowsers) can deal much better with these since they also have much better implemented parser engines and support for that format.

Further many apps, and the Affinity line is no exception here, do rely on third party code (APIs and libraries) for reading/parsing/writing other file formats, so they just reuse what other code can handle and offers at all in terms of certain file format support.

 

 

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  • 2 months later...

Hello I tried after a format to go adobe free and got the same problem with EPS files.

I suggest all of us to sent emails to the tech support of the stock sites we are working with and ask them to require from uploaders to upload Ai files with PDF compatibility.

I will do this for freepik, please do the same everyone. If there are enough emails asking that they will realize that we design in a world where exists many more programs than the ones from adobe.

Those EPS files can't open in anything else but the illustrator, and we are so many people working so many programs out there, designer, draw, inkscape, xara, we just need to unite our voices to be heard and not take silly suggestions like to pay the one program they feel comfortable with.

After all it is not like we are asking for affinity designer files, we are just asking for files compatible with everything that take little to no effort to be made, just save Ai with a tickbox.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Don't get me wrong i am a big fan of Affinty products, and desperately trying to get rid of Adobe but...

I have another issue, somewhat related to this subject. When i copy a vector shape from illustrator, i can paste it in apple iwork suite apps like keynote (which means it works system wide), or in a figma file keeping its vector properties. When i do the same from affinity designer (tried with copy as svg checked and unchecked), copied vector converts into bitmap in the clipboard, losing all vector properties. That's another huge problem, i can live with ungrouped hundreds of layers in stock vector images, but everytime i need a vector shape do i have to export in svg and than import to wherever i need? i mean if macos or an arbitrary app like figma can accept vector information from illustrator, why can't affinity send proper vector information?

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16 hours ago, Evren said:

Don't get me wrong i am a big fan of Affinty products, and desperately trying to get rid of Adobe but...

I have another issue, somewhat related to this subject. When i copy a vector shape from illustrator, i can paste it in apple iwork suite apps like keynote (which means it works system wide), or in a figma file keeping its vector properties. When i do the same from affinity designer (tried with copy as svg checked and unchecked), copied vector converts into bitmap in the clipboard, losing all vector properties. That's another huge problem, i can live with ungrouped hundreds of layers in stock vector images, but everytime i need a vector shape do i have to export in svg and than import to wherever i need? i mean if macos or an arbitrary app like figma can accept vector information from illustrator, why can't affinity send proper vector information?

That's weird, in windows it paste as vector from illustrator to designer and visa versa.

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  • 1 month later...

Oh my god you guys! 

I'm two days in affinity and discovered number of problems you didn't solve any of the important features like tracing, text case, outline most of the brushes, and now this! 

Do you realise, most of vector resourses online comes in EPS format? 

Edited by EvGa
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3 hours ago, EvGa said:

Oh my god you guys! 

I'm two days in affinity and discovered number of problems you didn't solve any of the important features like tracing, text case, outline most of the brushes, and now this! 

Do you realise, most of vector resourses online comes in EPS format? 

but if adobe have hardlocked their files like this, what they can do? The only thing we can do is to ask stock providers to make pdf compatible files.

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8 hours ago, EvGa said:

text case

For that one you need to use Publisher, not Designer.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
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