Affinity Designer how can I replace shapes with an image?

[Daiwid]

Hello everyone,

I am a complete beginner and have no idea how to phrase my question, so I could search for it on Google or here on the forum, so please, go easy on me

In my .ai file, there are different shapes, like the black ones I marked on the screenshot.
How can I cut them out or replace them with an image?

I want to insert a gradient instead of the black and white shapes, but limited to the respective shapes. The shapes should serve as a kind of template.

I would really appreciate any help with this.

Thanks a lot in advance!

[Hangman]

Hi @Daiwid and welcome to the forums,

Basically, if you use the black shapes as clipping paths, that will allow you to nest images inside them to create the effect you want... For gradients you can just apply them directly to the shapes themselves...

https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/index.html

 

 

[Daiwid]

7 hours ago, Hangman said:

Hi @Daiwid and welcome to the forums,

Basically, if you use the black shapes as clipping paths, that will allow you to nest images inside them to create the effect you want... For gradients you can just apply them directly to the shapes themselves...

https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/index.html

 

 

Ohh, you are so awesome! Thank you very very much for your help! 😍
I was unable to find my way around in the help area.

I can not help, but I must ask you this:
How you could extract only one of the three banners from the file? I couldn't find a tool to mark only the center banner.
How did you make the black areas to be one area?
And why are the layers on your machine are all named? On my PC they are named Curve and Cuves, and often have no thumbnail.

[Hangman]

1 hour ago, Daiwid said:

Ohh, you are so awesome! Thank you very very much for your help! 😍

You are very welcome, glad I was able to help...

1 hour ago, Daiwid said:

How you could extract only one of the three banners from the file? I couldn't find a tool to mark only the center banner.
How did you make the black areas to be one area?
And why are the layers on your machine are all named? On my PC they are named Curve and Cuves, and often have no thumbnail.

Oh, I quickly recreated the file as it is very simple (literally took about 5 minutes) so that I could demonstrate the principals better with the screen recording which is why the layers also have names...

In terms of extracting only one banner from the three you should be able to select just the layers or elements that make up the banner you want and perhaps copy and paste these into a new Designer document of appropriate size and resolution or you could create Artboards in your Designer file, again selecting and grouping the graphics for each banner respectively and then positioning the graphics accordingly, with one on each artboard.

To make the black areas one area, with the relevant layers selected in the layers panel you can use the Add Boolean  to merge them together into a single shape or go to Layer > Geometry > Add.

 

[Daiwid]

5 hours ago, Hangman said:

You are very welcome, glad I was able to help...

Oh, I quickly recreated the file as it is very simple (literally took about 5 minutes) so that I could demonstrate the principals better with the screen recording which is why the layers also have names...

In terms of extracting only one banner from the three you should be able to select just the layers or elements that make up the banner you want and perhaps copy and paste these into a new Designer document of appropriate size and resolution or you could create Artboards in your Designer file, again selecting and grouping the graphics for each banner respectively and then positioning the graphics accordingly, with one on each artboard.

To make the black areas one area, with the relevant layers selected in the layers panel you can use the Add Boolean  to merge them together into a single shape or go to Layer > Geometry > Add.

 

Once again, thank you very much for your help 😊

I found out when I use the move tool and start dragging outside the banner, I can actually select it individually from the other ones.

Only 5 minutes? 😲 I wasted hours on figuring out how to make shapes that have this angle, so I ended up buying the graphic. I mean, I have no problem buying things, but it would have been much cooler if I were able to make these myself. Where can I learn to make this?

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, Daiwid said:

Only 5 minutes? 😲 I wasted hours on figuring out how to make shapes that have this angle, so I ended up buying the graphic.

LOL, well you can also automatically trace/vectorize that, in case you have that template as a bitmap, instead of redrawing (manual tracing) all manually by hand, which takes then less than ~1 minute.

Here's a quick trace of the portion of your screenshot without the texts, since applying own text with the Artistic Text Tool looks either way better, than some traced uneditable vector text as curves ...

Or more compacted as already color merged and undivided layer curves (see the PDF & SVG files) ...

• Screenshot2023.afdesign
• Screenshot2023.pdf
• Screenshot2023.svg

 

[Hangman]

11 hours ago, v_kyr said:

LOL, well you can also automatically trace/vectorize that, in case you have that template as a bitmap, instead of redrawing (manual tracing) all manually by hand, which takes then less than ~1 minute.

Yeah, but where's the fun in that, LOL... 😂

Amazing though Vectorizer is, it's done a pretty bad job with the banner to be honest...

You would spend longer than five minures sorting the layers out, identifying and removing those duplicated and not required, repairing or redrawing e.g., the horizontal line with the round end cap that is split in two, part grey, part white, removing the arrow shaped whole punched in the black triangle (bottom right) and the horizontal line with the round end cap in the black shape on the left and if you decided you wanted to change individual elements or move say one of the grey oblique rectangles then that impacts the white layer because vectorizer has simply made a cut out based on everything in the grey and black layers so you would find yourself adding a white background rectangle to the design anyway...

I could also see potential printing issues using the artwork generated by vectorizer which would take time to fix... It hasn't made a particularly clean job of the grey layer for example adding extraneous lines, splitting the stripe pattern into two sections and so on...

 

Where I do think Vectorizer excels however is with converting flat artworks into vectors, e.g., here's one I made earlier...

Original PNG Left | Vectorizer Traced Version Right

 

Though it's got a way to go when it comes to generating gradients, but still pretty impressive...

Original PNG Left | Vectorizer Traced Version Right

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, Hangman said:

Amazing though Vectorizer is, it's done a pretty bad job with the banner to be honest...

You mean that online AI based https://vectorizer.ai/ ?

I think that one always also first algorithmically tries to perform some image sort detection and makes some contrast/sharpening enhancements, before going to determining from which beneath and similar colored pixels to build curve lines from. It does also often combines different beneath dark/light colored pixels into curves. Further it always also does some huge amount of curve roundness and smoothing optimizations for curves, as it also always tries to build less node curves etc.

That one IMO works best for 2D images (as most tracers/vectorizers do), though it's especially somehow good in (re)generating bad quality images into something still vector usable. But due to the way it operates it will not trace/vectorize always all things in a 1:1 (pixel -> vector) manner, meaning here it partly does change & combine pixel areas flow and colors, so it does not keep finer image nuances 1:1.

However, for such things like that banner, the normal (algorithmically old fashioned none AI) tracers/vectorizers will perform a much better job, when setup accordingly. - For example I used just a predefined/forced 3 color trace in order to get rid of the blue color bounding boxes of a rect cutout of the initial above shown screenshot. Here common tracers like Inkscape (Potrace & Autotrace based), VectorMagic or SV ... etc. will generate a quite good and perfect 1:1 vector representation of that.

There are sometimes huge differences between Tracers/Vectorizers in terms of how they handle color quantisation, so how good and more exact they determine the pixel colors nd tonings in an passed over image. The best tracer in this regard that I know is VectorMagic, followed by SV and Inkscape which are slightly less good in this discipline.

4 hours ago, Hangman said:

Though it's got a way to go when it comes to generating gradients, but still pretty impressive...

Gradients are always a week and difficult to handle point of/in all vectorizers, as they just determine differences in pixel color shades via an accumulation of beneath pixel colorings in an image. Since commonly vectors are handled on a one fill color base, they will treat pixel gradients in an approximated manner in order to generate vectors out of those areas (...as can be good seen in the last Marilyn Monroe sample you showed above).

[Daiwid]

Automatic generation is not quite what I wanted to learn^^

How can I make such oblique shapes as in the banner myself?

[Hangman]

This is the sort of approach you can use by shearing a rectangle...

[Daiwid]

49 minutes ago, Hangman said:

This is the sort of approach you can use by shearing a rectangle...

 

Ok, wow, this so ridiculous easy, I'm stunned...

Anyways, thank you very much once again for your kind help about this 😊

[Hangman]

Hi @Daiwid,

That’s absolutely no problem at all, happy to have been able to help… 😁

[v_kyr]

3 hours ago, Daiwid said:

How can I make such oblique shapes as in the banner myself?

For others than the rect see for example also the other shape forms, like the rounded rectangle etc. and the possible variations of those via predefined or customized shape settings. - This one for example is also used as a little grey one in your above shown screenshot ...

Other than that for more complex shapes you can always combine (compounds) via the shape builder tool and also geometric add shapes/curves in order to form more specific and/or complex ones. - Another way for more pseudo 3D formed shapes/curves is to make use of the vector warp distortion features then.