Affinity Publisher: filter on opacity glitch when exporting to pdf

[Dybkjær]

Affinity Designer 2.1 and 2.2.0 2005 beta (help says:  2.2 eb0ee), on iPad Pro 12.9 sixth generation, iPadOS 16.6.1.

A transparent png with a filter on a background with reduced opacity (e.g. 50 %) will darken the background within the bounding box of the png when exported to pdf.

See the two screen shots below (cropped). The rightmost one is from the pdf and has a darker area in the transparent part of the png:

The enclosed zip file has 7 files with reduced complexity with only one page with two objects (extracted from a 144 page book with several of those glitches in seemingly random places).

The files with suffix beta are pdf's generated by the beta version. The other pdf files are generated with AP 2.1.

The three original files: 

1. filter-opacity-pdf-glitch.afpub: Reduced original that exhibits the export glitch. It has a png with an adjustment filter on top of a blue background with partial opacity.

2. opacity-pdf-glitch.afpub: Without the png adjustment filter. Produces no glitch.

3. filter-pdf-glitch.afpub: With full opacity of the background. Produces no glitch.

As for other pdf generation errors, there are workarounds (e.g. produce the colour levels without opacity reduction), but they are quite cumbersome and troublesome to first detect, and next figure out.

Best regards,
     Hans

PS: The example glitch is pretty light. One may obtain much darker contrast glitches.

pdf-png-glitch.zip

[Return]

Add a vector mask to the adjustment layer with the size of the document/page.

NewFromBeta-filter-opacity-pdf-glitch.afpub NewFromBeta-filter-opacity-pdf-glitch.pdf

[Hangman]

Hi @Dybkjær,

See if the attached Publisher file works for you...

filter-opacity-pdf-no-glitch.afpub

filter-opacity-pdf-no-glitch-retail.pdf

filter-opacity-pdf-no-glitch-beta.pdf

[Dybkjær]

21 hours ago, Return said:

Add a vector mask to the adjustment layer with the size of the document/page

I can see it works, but why?

[Dybkjær]

10 hours ago, Hangman said:

See if the attached Publisher file works for you...

Hi Hangman, that also seems to work. What did you do the to document? The adjustment layer and the 50 % opacity still seem to be there.

In my original document I ended up replacing the 50 % opacity with 100 % opacity and increasing the luminance (in HSL colour view) to match what it was. That has the added advantage of removing some transparency, something PDF tends to get wrong when printed, even if the PDF looks ok on-screen.

[Hangman]

Hi @Dybkjær,

Take a quick look at the layers panel. I simply added the recolour adjustment layer directly to the 'stjernebørn hdb' layer (right image).

[Dybkjær]

47 minutes ago, Hangman said:

Take a quick look at the layers panel. I simply added the recolour adjustment layer directly to the 'stjernebørn hdb' layer (right image).

Thanks. Yes, I see it. A simpler solution to the adjustment.

Still, the glitch is an error, but I'll have your approach in mind next time I do this sort of thing.

[EmT]

Hi @Dybkjær
We are aware of this issue and I've passed along your example to the devs.