OVERPRINT Gradient DESIGNER 2. Win 10

[kcmoto]

I'm an Affinity Newbie getting ready to cut ties with adobe.

Two part question:

- I want to overprint the black to white gradient (or 100% black to 0% black) on top of the red (lets say its pantone 186 red). How do I do that? (For printing press, IE: cmyk or spot) Reference jpeg image.

- I also want to use the same artwork for web use (reference jpeg image). Is there a multiply option for the gradient? If I'm working in RGB, how do I multiply the gradient?

In illustrator I can do this in 2 seconds. But I hate adobe, so I'm hoping I'm overlooking something in Designer 2.

Bonus round question: Can I drag and drop colors from the artwork into the swatches toolbox? I tried the other direction by dragging a swatch color onto a gradient and it crashes designer 2 every single time.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[loukash]

1 hour ago, kcmoto said:

I want to overprint the black to white gradient (or 100% black to 0% black) on top of the red (lets say its pantone 186 red). How do I do that?

To put it humorously:
You'll have to engage in voodoo!  

But seriously:
There is some kind of a major flaw or bug when it comes to gradient overprint, and the workaround we've figured out some time ago is indeed close to voodoo.
Check out my recent post here:

Alternatively – if your printer accepts PDFs with transparency à la PDF/X-4 – you can use the Multiply blend mode which usually shouldn't rasterize anything below.

1 hour ago, kcmoto said:

how do I multiply the gradient?

https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/pages/Layers/layerBlendModes.html

1 hour ago, kcmoto said:

Can I drag and drop colors from the artwork into the swatches toolbox?

https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/pages/Clr/selectingClr.html

1 hour ago, kcmoto said:

I'm an Affinity Newbie getting ready to cut ties with adobe.

In general, you really may want to read at least some chapters of the built-in help files and watch a few video tutorials. They really do help.  

For the record, it took me 5 years since I bought Designer in 2014 until I was ready to give up Adobe CS5.5. A significant part of the process is to forget about the Adobe Mindset™ because many of the so called Adobe "industry standard workflows" were in fact just decades old ugly workarounds. Been there done that, too. Whereas Serif was bold enough to try new workflows with Affinity. Some are frankly a bit hit-or-miss and some still have bugs but the overall concept of the "Affinity Trinity" was a smart move.

[loukash]

2 hours ago, kcmoto said:

Bonus round question

Bonus round answer:

2 hours ago, kcmoto said:

If I'm working in RGB

If you want to overprint blacK (as in "cmyK") over a spot color, your document must be CMYK.
And do not use those built in gray swatches! Those are RGB. Use K values only via CMYK sliders.
Mixing these things up may only result in conversion of your spot plate to CMYK values upon export.

Culprit:
Unlike in Adobe apps, there is no object based overprint attribute in Affinity. You can only set global swatches to overprint, then apply those to objects. But… that doesn't work with gradients at all. 
(Yeah, I know. It sucks. )
Also, K:100 will always overprint unless you uncheck the corresponding PDF export option. Most of the time, this is a Good Thing™.

[lacerto]

9 hours ago, loukash said:

you can use the Multiply blend mode which usually shouldn't rasterize anything below.

Most of the time it probably works, but is not of course the same as overprint.

I probably misunderstood the "mindset" thing. This kind of talk somewhat reminds me of "having to" (whoever forces) do trivial business-oriented things in "Micro$oft way" and "think" "different" and be automatically "creative" when switching to Apple egosystem, using the exact same apps on that platform. Being forced to upgrade from Altsys/Aldus/Macromedia to monopolizing Adobe was not altogether bad experience at times when properly color managed PDF workflows were introduced (and were a bit later made non-proprietary ISO standards).

For me the most attractive feature of Affinity apps has been that they feel instantly familiar because having copied as much as possible from Adobe apps, and that they additionally have some nice functional pluses that Adobe apps do not have. But talking about "Affinity" (a different) mindset (and possibly referring to things like Studio) does not make sense to me (I consider it a sales gimmick and a technological flaw in context or press production). Affinity mindset, if there is one, is "low cost non subscription". Production-wise it often means lots of workarounds, or "voodoo", as you put it. That is totally fine, considering the price, but to put it right, it often requires training in "Adobe mindset", that is, with industry standards.

[loukash]

Just now, lacerto said:

Being forced to upgrade from Altsys/Aldus/Macromedia to monopolizing Adobe was not altogether bad experience at times when properly color managed PDF workflows were introduced (and were a bit later made non-proprietary ISO standards).

Point taken, and I agree wholeheartedly. Until CC came along, I was quite happy with Adobe. Of course, exception being them killing my beloved FreeHand and forcing me into Illfrustrator…

3 minutes ago, lacerto said:

feature of Affinity apps has been that they feel instantly familiar because having copied as much as possible from Adobe apps

Here I have to disagree. Some paradigms have simply become ubiquitous, and possibly even Adobe has got them from elsewhere. Or they simply bought the company that invented them…

6 minutes ago, lacerto said:

but to put it right, it often requires training in "Adobe mind set", that is, with industry standards.

You already likely know what my personal pet peeve is with Affinity: PDF export
And obviously PDFlib simply isn't up to par with Adobe PDF. That's the main tragedy here.

When I talk about the Schmadobe Mindset™ though, I mean the creative workflows. Regardless whether the intended output will eventually work out all right or not.

[lacerto]

3 hours ago, loukash said:

Until CC came along, I was quite happy with Adobe.

I initially shared that view, but nowadays think differently. Compare CC with Quark and Corel (practically both subscription nowadays, also Xara Designer, probably not known to you because of being Windows only), and what you get with these deals. The only CC product I personally still subscribe is Photography, at EUR 9.99 per month, and I get all versions of PS, Lightroom, Adobe Fonts, some cloud space and full Express. I think it is a bargain (on multiple devices on multiple platforms). [EDIT: But as a Windows user, I can of course still use all CS6 Master apps on latest Windows version without problems, something that Apple made impossible on macOS when barring 32-bit apps after Mojave.]

I suppose functionally the thing that changed my mind and stopped me hating Adobe was years of working with Adobe fonts. I had earlier purchased a share of Adobe Font Folio 8/9 (costing about 20,000 FIM = about 3,400 EUR) for 20 users which was quite pricey at the time), and subsequently purchased a 5-user 11.1 package just for our company (a family business of 2 users) somewhere around EUR 2,300. Still much cheaper than going for anything with Monotype nowadays. All this seems like a lot of nonsense nowadays that Google etc. offer everything "free", right? But in a changed world, you often use fonts differently and not perhaps primarily for printing press, and with Adobe Fonts, you get a license to use the fonts also on the web. If you do not just prefer to nick your fonts (= not caring where they come from), it is not such a bad deal.

And then there are innovative things with AI (and Adobe seeming to be doing something to get creators credited -- or perhaps I am just seeing this through pink (or actually green) Spotify-glasses, naively thinking that this does at least some good for musicians/photographers)? 

[loukash]

4 minutes ago, lacerto said:

I think it is a bargain.

Being self-employed since 1988 and working less and less as a designer and more and more as a musician – barely making any money with either, hehe – nothing was ever bargain for me until Serif came along. All my Affinity rants aside: what Serif offers here for this little money is in fact seriously amazing.

1 minute ago, lacerto said:

Spotify-glasses, naively thinking that this does at least some good for musicians

Um… meanwhile this week, elsewhere: 
heise.de/news/Spotify-schliesst-kleine-Kuenstler-und-White-Noise-von-Einnahmen-aus-9344679.html
In German so you may need to use a translator, but tl;dr: it's seriously bad news.
(Disclosure: I don't do any streaming, neither as a musician nor as a customer.)

But this thread is actually about overprinting, right?  

[lacerto]

24 minutes ago, loukash said:

But this thread is actually about overprinting, right?  

Certainly but it is also a kind of a thing of culture and quality, and not necessarily overpriced, even if not free. Be careful of "free"!