Portions of images grayed out on PDF

[HarryW]

See attached screen grabs of PDF file and PDF dialog window.

The two upper right images have a vertical band of gray covering their right thirds, ruining one third of this job. The PDF export preset is PDF-digial (high quality) with modifications as shown in the screen grab. The bottom right image, and the type, seem unaffected. They are all the same image, linked. This occurs regardless of PDF settings, whether or not the images are linked or embedded, and occurs on both of my Macs (Mac Mini 2012, Macbook Pro 2015); OS 10.15.7 (Catalina). Final use is for fine art repro on an Epson P800. This fault is not visible in Affinity Publisher or in the PDF preview window.

This has never occurred in the past when I was running Affinity Photo and Publisher v1x. I had done scores of similar layouts over the past couple of years without getting any portions grayed out.

My workaround today was to export as PNG which seems to have solved the problem.

Help! Any ideas? I would prefer to print from my PDF files, not only for this use but also newsletters and ads for print repro.

[MikeTO]

Hi Harry, I don't know the answer but what does it look like if you re-open the PDF for editing in Affinity? Are there any clues to be found there?

If you change the image to one you've used before does the problem go away? If so, you might need to upload the image and document here so somebody else can test it. If you can't do that publicly then please wait for Serif to reply - they might provide a dropbox link.

Cheers

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[laurent32]

Seen that post too… compression => smaller files => speed-up transfers =>? less data missed ???

[HarryW]

Sorry to take so long to respond.

MikeTO: The image is the same linked image throughout the layout. The artifact remains when I open the PDF in Affinity Publisher and Photo.

lacerto and laurent32: The gray artifact still appears with JPEG compression (100%).

A couple of months ago, I had to upgrade to Mac OS 10.15.7 (Catalina) and consequently lost the use of my old Adobe CS6 suite. I trashed all the CS6 applications, but I wonder whether there is some residue of Acrobat Distiller left somewhere on my system and is conflicting with Affinity's distiller.

I don't want to go back to renting from Adobe. I have jobs coming in, too.

Any ideas?

[MikeTO]

34 minutes ago, HarryW said:

A couple of months ago, I had to upgrade to Mac OS 10.15.7 (Catalina) and consequently lost the use of my old Adobe CS6 suite. I trashed all the CS6 applications, but I wonder whether there is some residue of Acrobat Distiller left somewhere on my system and is conflicting with Affinity's distiller.

Acrobat Distiller could not impact Affinity's PDF export, they're different systems.

You might try it in the 2.1 beta to see if that makes a difference.

If you're able to share a document with an image here for testing, one of us would give it a go for you.

Cheers

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[HarryW]

Thank you, lacerto, but the artifact remains as before.

It seems as though the PDF process in some way is rendering a rectangular area of the page properly, but also includes a gray (overlay?) field in the upper right.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[HarryW]

Artifact still appears with Metal turned off in Affinity preferences, and Advanced unchecked in PDF Export.

Weird. I placed a tint in the background (all the way back) to set off the gray artifact area. Note that the gray artifact remains only in the two upper right linked images. Artifact appears if I put the tint frame in front or in back.

All the images are linked to the same Affinity Photo file. The same issue occurs when I used embedded instead of linked images. Why would this gray artifact affect only those two linked images?

 

cards tint.pdf

[laurent32]

Looking at your PDF setting…

1/ Thought you could try to turn OFF overprint black and see ?

2/ You're downsampling images above 375 dpi but then use 400 dpi, maybe you could try not to downsample ?

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[Lee D]

Ideally we could do with the original Affinity document so it can be checked out to see if the cause of that overlay on those two can be found.

[HarryW]

lacerto and Lee D,

I converted the linked image files to Tiff and the PDF is now clean, with no artifacts!

I would have thought that of all file formats, the safest to use would be Affinity Photo, but this resulted in an artifact that rendered roughly a third of the file unusable for printing on my Epson P800.

As a user, I would call this a bug. How do I report it?

Many thanks to all of you who helped me out!

[lacerto]

Obsolete.