Wishes/ideas regarding color handling (and more)

[Harald Punz]

I am mainly a Publisher-User. (I use all the apps, but mainly in their Publisher persona.)

I have noticed that Affinity’s basic color management is what forces me to spend the most time on finding workarounds:

 

A. There should be an option to ignore color profiles on import and on paste and instead preserve the color values.

At the moment the default (and only) behaviour is that the app converts between profiles, changing all color values. I often had to redo a whole document just because I forgot I was working with a different profile when pasting content. Also if you want to place a Logo as an image, for instance, you would have to have a logo for each color profile you will ever be working with, just to make sure your color values stay consistent. This is not the way.

 

B. There should be a way to view color separations and overprint.

We are already halfway there.

Using the Photo persona in publisher you can already see the CMYK-Separations. Which is a good way to check if a four color black, that you don’t want to be there, is hiding somewhere in your document.

What it unfortunately doesn’t do, is show overprint. So no way for me to quickly check if the black I am using is overprinting all the backgrounds correctly.

And of course, if you are working with spot colors, you are out of luck having them show up as a separate channel.

 

C. The blacks used in standard palettes and layer effects need to be aware if the document color space is CMYK or RGB.

At the moment, all the blacks in the standard color palettes consist of all four colors. I almost never want that. The app should be aware which color mode I am working in and give me one color blacks when I am in CMYK mode. I worked around that by throwing out all standard palettes and replacing them with palettes of my own with correct blacks.

However, throughout the apps unreplaceable 4C-blacks are hiding in panels. I. e. layer effects like drop shadows, that all default to four colors. I have to manually switch them every time and you can guess how often I have forgotten about that.

 

Another random wish, not involving color management:

- Workspace export and import

It is baffling that it’s possible to save your palette workspace, but there is no way to export it and import it on a new install of the software. All I can do is take a screenshot of the old configuration and redo it manually on the new computer. (I know that there are workspace files somewhere to be found which you should be able to copy manually, but that workaround never worked von me on MacOS. And anway, you shouldn’t have to resort to that.)

 

[Harald Punz]

Like i said. These are all workarounds, and we shouldn‘t need to do them. Hence my suggestions.