Affinity Designer: Exporting 6m project to 1:10 without quality loss for printing

[Royk]

Hi peeps,

 

I just finnished a big wall artwork for a client that needs to be printed. The artwork contains text, vector illustrations and photo's. The issue is that the printer needs a 1:10 file with artwork embeded. In Adobe illustrator I can protect the photo's that they dont lose quality while scaling. I can not find this option in Designer. Like protecting the pixels as a smart object in Photoshop

The request is the deliver an 1:10 PDF. Any thoughts?

[Petar Petrenko]

Make the document 60 cm x ?? cm and put the picture with 300 dpi at least and make PDF.

[Royk]

3 minutes ago, NNN said:

Make the document 60 cm x ?? cm and put the picture with 300 dpi at least and make PDF.

Yeah, that is the workaround i am doing now. But it is not something i prefer. I want to images to be protected like a smart object. Than it doenst matter how you scale it, it keeps the information. Now i just upgrade it to 300dpi and scale it down. So when they blow it all up in the printer, it is still okay. I can not believe that this is the workflow to go in Designer. So if I mis something, please let me know for a other time.

[Petar Petrenko]

When they will scale it to 1:1 the image would be 30 dpi at least, which is OK for such a big print. I'm doing the same.

[Palatino]

6 hours ago, Royk said:

The request is the deliver an 1:10 PDF. Any thoughts?

Caution: absolute sizes of rounded edges may be excluded from scaling. All images will have a higher resolution by a factor of 10. So pay attention to the resolution when exporting.

[thomaso]

8 hours ago, Royk said:

The issue is that the printer needs a 1:10 file with artwork embeded. In Adobe illustrator I can protect the photo's that they dont lose quality while scaling. I can not find this option in Designer.

In Affinity placed images don't loose quality if scaled or if the document gets scaled or the resolution of the .afdesign get changed. The quality of an image (= "image layer") gets rather decided during export by export resolution and image compression setting.

Different to image layers scaling an object or the .afdesign document affects the quality if the image layer got rasterized before, which results in a "pixel layer". Those can lose quality if the document or pixel layer gets up-scaled but not when down-scaled.

As @Palatino pointed out, scaling an .afdesign can modify certain vector properties (e.g. strokes, corners, layer effects), if not set before to auto-adjust when scaled ("scale with object"). Thus it can be more useful in your situation to export the 6 meter layout as temporary 6 meter PDF (if wanted with only 10% of the requested output resolution to reduce file size) and place this resulting PDF as resource in a new .afdesign with the required width of 60 cm and the requested resolution. Keep the PDF layer mode set to "Passthrough" and scale it down to 60 cm. Then export another PDF with the required print resolution, it will have the required 60 cm.

7 hours ago, Royk said:

I can not believe that this is the workflow to go in Designer.

Actually the common workflow for media of large sizes is to layout in documents with scale (e.g. 1:10, 1:20, 1:100 etc). Consider that various applications may have limitations for the document dimensions they can open or create. For instance still a few years ago PDF was limited to 5 meter.

[Palatino]

5 hours ago, thomaso said:

Actually the common workflow for media of large sizes is to layout in documents with scale (e.g. 1:10, 1:20, 1:100 etc).

Yes. I don't like working in 1:10, but it has the undeniable advantage of being able to use "normal" font sizes. Also other sizes like shadows or radii are still in the usable range.

(I was just too lazy to write as much as @thomaso. 😉)

[thomaso]

10 hours ago, Palatino said:

(I was just too lazy to write as much as @thomaso. 😉)

While both forgot to mention:

• A 6-metre page printed at 10% is equivalent to a 60-cm page printed at 100%. (= 1:10)

• A 6-metre page printed at 100% is corresponds to a 60-cm page printed at 1000%.

• A 6-metre page exported at 100 DPI corresponds to a 60-centimetre page exported at 1000 DPI. (= 1:10)

[thomaso]

9 hours ago, Palatino said:

I don't like working in 1:10, but it has the undeniable advantage of being able to use "normal" font sizes. Also other sizes like shadows or radii are still in the usable range.

It's true concerning a simple shift of the decimal separator ( . or , ) … but it doesn't matter or help if you consider the different viewing distances: A 5-metre fair wall read from  1-2 metre distance may have a smaller text size than a 5-metre billboard read from 15 or 50 metre for instance.

[tudor]

@Royk if you have access to Acrobat DC, it can scale PDFs by percentages or by WxH values. You can also do this with the free trial of Callas pdfToolbox.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[thomaso]

40 minutes ago, lacerto said:

Not having an automatic analysis of the most suitable compression / quality rate for each image to be exported is a big time waster. It means that to be on a safe side, it is probably wise to use the default (98) compression quality if the document contains multiple images of different sizes and properties.

To me it appears sufficient in Affinity to export with 85% without a visible change in image quality (for images with export document resolution of 300 dpi).

I'm not sure how the Affinity JPG export algorithm differs from Lightroom, but there is at least a rough comparison (with various images) that shows that, for example, at 98% - 93% the compression to file size ratio is not as efficient: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality

ps: Interestingly there seem to be just 10 steps, no fluent increase/decrease of compression vs size. (while the Photoshop UI offers 12 steps, right?).

[lacerto]

Obsolete.