Turn everything black/white quickly ADesigner2

[Laeghaire]

Hi there, I wonder if theres a quick way to turn content very quickly into black and white.

I only use affinity designer to import AI I then use on a program called silhouette to cut contours on various materials.

Long story short I dont need fancy gradient fills, on the contrary they make masking in program 2 super hard.

Right now im trying since about 2 hours to get a selection black and white. this is sad and not very intuitive. I noticed all objects had a weird linear fill and I could not just easily say solid color, but I had to change the gradient to black to black, unless ofc I clicked each single object separately.

That didnt do the trick either though wich was very confusing I had solid color fill show me the thing please ? I was searching the web and I cant find any gradient tool as it was suggested in a video ? that seemed to be in designer 1.

I however found out that each of the many objects had a mask attached I can just deselect. Then the faded out object become solid.  I cant believe it's not possible to cmdA select all objects and remove all masks ?

I feel incredibly inapt at this and helpless and with any other new program I get going within minutes...not designer.. even selecting things sometimes is a pain

2 hours trying getting something black and white... lol ?

[David in Яuislip]

1 hour ago, Laeghaire said:

I cant believe it's not possible to cmdA select all objects and remove all masks

In Photo I can right click on a mask icon and choose Select Same Name from the pop-up menu then click the dustbin. Is this not possible in Designer?

[GarryP]

Welcome to the forums @Laeghaire

When you say that you want “black and white”, do you mean only black and white without greys in between, or do you mean black and white with greys in between (greyscale)?

One quick way to convert the contents of a document to greyscale is to create a new Black & White Adjustment layer at the top of the layer stack – see attached image.

To get only black and white, without greys, may need different techniques depending on exactly what you want to achieve. Maybe a Threshold Adjustment, maybe a LUT Adjustment, maybe something else, it’s difficult to know without more information.

If you can give us an existing “before” and “after” image, we should be able to advise better.

[Laeghaire]

41 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Welcome to the forums @Laeghaire

When you say that you want “black and white”, do you mean only black and white without greys in between, or do you mean black and white with greys in between (greyscale)? 

 

Hi thank you so much no I really want black and white. I am so sorry to bug you guys with what must be really simple ???

I found the gradient tool its "hidden" within the fill tool it seems to me  once a gradient is applied..you're stuck with it ? I played around with it and could move the gradient around the image outside, adjust the angle so it doesn't affect the image but not delete it. I also could not get the gradients to disappear.

 

this is an example I just want this in a 2 tone color. I get why everyone plays around with gradients ..but really they hinder me in cutting out silhouettes of graphics.

whatever I do I cant make that silly fading of the color go away. ink this case id like all graphics to be plain white. but they fade in and out..

 

the closest I can do is go view wireframe, but then they aren't filled and I need the fillings to be there,

Here is an example see the ball ? its got some gradient thing I dont want just like every object here has some gradient.

 

now I dont want that I want it solid.. at one point I noticed I could expand and saw the mask if I just delete hence remove the mask:

voila :

 

solid

 

now the question is the same since playing around with filling wont do anything much if the object has a mask attached how can I get rid of ALL MASKS of ALL OBJECTS

at once ?

 

 

 

 

gfx.afdesign

 

[GarryP]

Thanks for the extra information and document.

I've removed the masks from the layers, and removed various unnecessary Layers and groups and came up with my attached image and document.
Is this what you want?

Note: The Colour Overlay Layer Effects I've used will force the groups to be rasterised upon export.

gfx-bw.afdesign

[carl123]

3 hours ago, Laeghaire said:

Hi there, I wonder if theres a quick way to turn content very quickly into black and white.

By black and white, do you mean something like this?

 

[v_kyr]

Probably is meant as plain B&W vector curves ...

 

• typical_ai_sketch.afdesign

[Laeghaire]

45 minutes ago, carl123 said:

By black and white, do you mean something like this?

 

exactly

[Laeghaire]

7 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Probably is meant as plain B&W vector curves ...

 

• typical_ai_sketch.afdesign

yes but I have no clue how you even got to second 0 in your video

[Laeghaire]

48 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Thanks for the extra information and document.

I've removed the masks from the layers, and removed various unnecessary Layers and groups and came up with my attached image and document.
Is this what you want?

Note: The Colour Overlay Layer Effects I've used will force the groups to be rasterised upon export.

gfx-bw.afdesign 103.96 kB · 1 download

yes thank you but how did you remove the masks. I have much more complex graphics with so many objects do I really need to remove every single mask separately ?

 

[v_kyr]

38 minutes ago, Laeghaire said:

yes but I have no clue how you even got to second 0 in your video

Easy, I've just vectorized what GarryP showed above as an ADe v2 screenshot after just two colors (... as I can't open ADe 2 files) and opened the PDF/SVG autotraced result in ADe v1. - Though if you already have all lines and circles as vectors, you can just geometrical add them or combine them via a compound etc. Then just use a black or white fill color for the whole resulting curves layer.

• typical_ai_vectorized.pdf

[carl123]

21 minutes ago, Laeghaire said:

exactly

The file is attached, I changed nothing in your original file. I just added a Gradient Map Adjustment to the top of the layer stack with 4 nodes, 2 black and 2 white

Not sure if any rasterization involved will be suitable for your final intended use

 

gfx-gma.afdesign

[Old Bruce]

31 minutes ago, Laeghaire said:

do I really need to remove every single mask separately ?

Pretty sure the answer is yes.

[GarryP]

16 hours ago, Laeghaire said:

yes thank you but how did you remove the masks. I have much more complex graphics with so many objects do I really need to remove every single mask separately ?

The masks were used to create transparency, and therefore the gradient, so if you want to remove the gradients then you will need to remove the masks and, in this case, each one will need to be removed individually as required.

You can remove a mask by selecting the mask layer in the Layers Panel and pressing the Delete key (or right-clicking and choosing Delete from the menu).

[lepr]

16 hours ago, Laeghaire said:

do I really need to remove every single mask separately ?

 

For your example document, the fortunate answer is no.  

All your masks are raster objects rather than vector objects. (Other documents may have masks that are vector objects or a mix of raster and vector masks.)
These masks can be selected simultaneously then deleted:

1. Select > Select Object > Pixel Objects
2. Delete [backspace].

Now its easy to make the design be solid white on black:

1. Select All [cmd+A] then set fill to white.
2. Select only the rectangular background Curve then set fill to black.

Strangely, some Groups appear to have Screen blend mode despite Passthrough being indicated as their blend mode at top of Layers panel. That may result in unwanted rasterisation when exporting to some formats, depending on export options. 
Correct that:

1. Select All [cmd+A]
2. Click on Passthrough at top of Layers panel and reselect Passthrough or select Normal.

Consider tidying the document structure by deleting the empty TEXTURE Layer and the many empty Groups found throughout the document, and moving non-background objects from BACKGROUND Layer to OBJECTS Layer.

gfx [white on black].afdesign

 

[Old Bruce]

18 minutes ago, lepr said:

These masks can be selected simultaneously then deleted:

1. Select > Select Object > Pixel Objects
2. Delete [backspace].

I will bet I looked at that a half dozen times and each time thought to myself "No, that won't work.". Never tried it. Brilliant solution.