White box around clipart NEWBIE

[Fairholm]

Hi,

New to Affinity, (and 78 years old), so please be gentle.

I have done a lot of searching as to removing the white box around clipart etc and have have come across one or two results, InDesign etc,  but can't find any help specifically for Aff Pub.

Could anyone point me in the right direction please?

Dave

[Hangman]

Hi @Fairholm and a warm welcome to the forums,

A Couple of Questions

1. Is the clipart in question vector or raster-based, i.e., is the file an EPS, SVG, PDF or JPEG, PNG file...
2. Could you perhaps upload a screenshot showing the white box that you are seeing so we have a better understanding of the issue? That should allow someone to provide a better resolution for you.

[thomaso]

Hi Fairholm,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

In APub itself there is no way to remove the white background of raster / pixel images, you would need a pixel editing tool like APhoto or APub's Photo Persona. There are various ways to achieve this, for instance:

You can use the Flood Select Tool to select all surrounding white, then either hide it with a mask layer or delete the selected pixels and thus create transparency in this area.

A workaround could be to set in the Blend Options of such an image its source range curve. This can be done directly in APub, without the need of APh or AD, but is useful only if the white colour is not part of the motive you want to isolate. For instance:

I wonder if you wouldn't rather want to search directly for clipart as vector files or .PNG files with transparency which would either not have any white background or would enable you to remove it or set it to invisible directly in APub's Layers Panel.

[NathanC]

Welcome to the forums @Fairholm,

If you're wanting to remove the white background from a raster clipart image (E.G a JPEG) It's generally easier to do this in Affinity Photo due to the number of additional tools that are available surrounding raster based image editing (E.G Pixel Selection Tools, 'Remove White Paper' Filter to name a few). One method in Publisher is to manually mask the image with the pen tool by tracing an outline around your image and then in the layers panel dragging and dropping your image onto the curve layer to nest it.

You're then free to make additional fine tuning adjustments to your path using the node tool after. Dependant on the complexity of the image this can take some time to do, but it will ensure that if there is any white that needs to be preserved in the image subject it is not affected.

[Fairholm]

Sorry, should have made it clear I only have Publisher, not the suite. Any free third party methods?

Dave

[Hangman]

Hi @Fairholm,

Assuming you're working with JPEG or PNG files with non-transparent backgrounds, you could take a look at Photopea which is free and would allow you to remove the white background from raster-based files...

https://www.photopea.com/

Can you perhaps provide a URL to the clipart you're using so we can see what you are dealing with as it may help to make better recommendations?

[Fairholm]

Thanks for your replies.

[v_kyr]

20 hours ago, Fairholm said:

Any free third party methods?

Another possibility would be to trace the pixel clipart to vectors, with the help of an online autotracer/vectorizer and then to remove the white curve/box from the resulting vectors, inside AFpub (...after importing the vector trace PDF/SVG file into AFpub). - This will give you also a better overall scalable vector representation of the pixel clipart.