Opening EPS File With Transparent Background

[Luli]

I downloaded an EPS vector image from Shutterstock which has a transparent background - stars to add to my own photo.  I’m trying to open it in Affinity photo but I can’t get the background to be transparent, it keeps showing the check boxes, whether I save it as PNG or any other formal I tried.  Please see screenshot below.  

Your help much appreciated!

Lubna

 

 

[loukash]

1 hour ago, Luli said:

see screenshot below

That looks as if you have placed some kind of a pixel preview of that EPS in Affinity Photo, not the actual EPS document.
Affinity doesn't have this exact kind of gray-on-gray "checkerboard" background pattern for transparency. The checkerboard is thus already an opaque part of the image you're placing.

[Dan C]

Hi Luli,

Could you check the image download, as that doesn't look like a vector or a transparent image. It may be worth opening the file in other software to see if it behaves the same.

Lee

[v_kyr]

6 hours ago, Luli said:

I downloaded an EPS vector image from Shutterstock which has a transparent background ... - I’m trying to open it in Affinity photo but I can’t get the background to be transparent ...

Most of those third party vector image ZIPs do contain EPS files which are (right out of the box) pretty useless for ADe, due to Adobe Ai specifics they use and the combined image portions they are build off.

As examples what such ZIPed archives contain, here such EPS files ...

• test_vector-sparkles-gold-dust-yellow-sparks-shine-light-effect.eps
• test_vector-yellow-glitter-particles-background-effect2.eps

... and their included JPG preview files ...

 

[loukash]

4 hours ago, v_kyr said:

As examples what such ZIPed archives contain, here such EPS files

Ouch.

Interestingly, although it's been created by Illustrator v21, I can crack it open with AI CS5. The transparency effect is partially lost.
Copy all to clipboard. (Disable objects you obviously won't need.)
In Designer: New From Clipboard
Ungroup everything, delete the rest of all unneeded curves
Select all, adjust the gradients to have transparency, blend mode Screen.
Voilà:

The blue "outlines" are there because it's a Node tool selection. Looks nice though.

Fun fact:
The "physics" of the sparks therein is nonsense: They cannot have a different angle.

[firstdefence]

Made a couple of pngs for the masses.

[v_kyr]

7 hours ago, loukash said:

Interestingly, although it's been created by Illustrator v21, I can crack it open with AI CS5. ...

I for example don't have/use Ai any longer (for some >= 5 years) and IMO the bad here is, that many of such by Shutterstuck, Vecteezy, etc. provided so called "vector" stuff some people here in the forum tend to buy and use, is mostly not usable at all in ADe when provided as EPS. - Or in other words, if you don't have also a more actual copy of Ai flowing around you can't then make much out of these things at all.

All in all I don't know why such services do always resist on such not that much reusable/exchangable EPS files. Also what the OP above showed, is pretty much how ADe will render/show it up when parsing such an by Ai generated EPS file!

[loukash]

In Designer, you can also download some similar vector images from Pexels or Pixabay.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Made a couple of pngs for the masses.

Made some too, but did that in APh out from the JPG previews with filtering out/removing the background checkerboards etc. But you loose then some of the initial image quality and so it's finally nothing really comparable to having instead "real scallable vectors" from ground up!

[v_kyr]

13 minutes ago, loukash said:

In Designer, you can also download some similar vector images from Pexels or Pixabay.

Not in such style the OP tried to use. - And most of the stuff those show can be easily done by yourself. Further you can't perform a plain vector based search for Pexels in contrast to Pixabay.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

 

[loukash]

33 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

you can't perform a plain vector based search for Pexels in contrast to Pixabay.

Ah, right. I wasn't at my Mac while posting that…  

34 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Not in such style the OP tried to use

As I said: similar. 
May need editing, of course.

To do so, @Luli:

1. in Designer, place the vector graphic from Pixabay
2. Resource Manager > Make Linked
3. Collect > choose a location to save it, usually it would be in SVG format
4. go to that location and open it natively in Designer (or in Photo)

You can also search directly on their webpage: pixabay.com/vectors/search

[loukash]

1 minute ago, lacerto said:

VectorStyler

Immediately crashed when I tried to crack open @v_kyr's EPS. (However, that's on El Capitan, and VS is not very stable here. Haven't tested on Catalina yet.)

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, lacerto said:

This is mostly true. Though you can try to use apps like Inkscape (free), VectorStyler, Xara Designer and CorelDRAW, that can do a bit more than Affinity apps trying to interpret proprietary Adobe Illustrator specific features that can be saved not only in (Illustrator) EPS files but also in PDFs saved by using Illustrator (when opting to save by retaining Illustrator editable features). Affinity apps also do not support the complete PDF and EPS feature sets so sometimes parts that get rasterized when opened in Affinity apps are actually not proprietary Adobe features, at all, and can be opened in some other apps as editable features.

Well let's say partly instead of mostly and of course it always highly depends on the related third party apps you may have then installed on your system. On Mac I tried if LibreOffice Draw, Inkscape and Photopea can probably do a better job here, but all those messed up with parsing & representing such EPS files -like the above as example shown ones- too. - So all in all it's hard to find some free or lower priced third party app, which has a good EPS parser then and which can deal well with by Illustrator's proprietary generated EPS specifica.

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, lacerto said:

Sometimes it is also difficult if not impossible to export features from the other tools further in formats (mainly PDF) that are editable in Affinity apps. But e.g. when I tried with the other of the above attached star files, I could open it in Xara and then save from there in PDF format to be successfully opened in Designer and then saved as Designer file, and it seems to work quite well. Then again, I could not do the same for the other file (it failed to open properly already in Xara Designer).

Couldn't tell for your Xara based parsing, since that shown ADe file is a v2 one and thus can't be opened in ADe v1.

[loukash]

2 hours ago, loukash said:

2 hours ago, lacerto said:

VectorStyler

Immediately crashed when I tried to crack open @v_kyr's EPS. (However, that's on El Capitan, and VS is not very stable here. Haven't tested on Catalina yet.)

Alright, it didn't crash on Catalina now.
Not that the crack-opened EPS is of any use though…

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[v_kyr]

41 minutes ago, lacerto said:

Xara Designer (or still more affordable Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is such software, but it only runs on Windows. And it has its limits.

I know Xara Photo & Graphic Designer (...which AFAI recall belongs to MAGIX nowadays), still have an older version of that too somewhere on a dusty and hardly used Win box. - And yes it has it's limits too, though in terms of EPS parsing looks to make a slightly better job than the third party tools I've tried out under MacOS so far.

52 minutes ago, lacerto said:

In practice there is no other way than using Illustrator, to avoid constant frustration.

Sadly the truth, as we've seen here and in other threads often too, since most other third party apps can't really deal in the same manner with Illustrator based EPS & AI files. Which in turn means that a bunch of stock vector images in Adobes EPS/AI format aren't much reusable at all in apps like the Affinity ones. - Thus for the OP and other people my advice would be here, to absolutely check twice the offered stock image vector file format compatibility, before buying some vector stock images at all and especially when there is no return guarantee. - Since without having Illustrator too, many of those are then pretty unusable.