How to make a background transparent for an eps object?

[ehbowen]

I had a designer create a logo for my self-publishing imprint earlier this year; however, he rendered it on a white background. I'm trying to use it on a dark-colored book spine, and the splotch of white doesn't look good. Here's the critical element:

CP logo color.eps

I've got the rest of the logo the way I want it, but I just can't get the white in this little square to go transparent and stay transparent when I re-export to .eps. I can get it to look the right way in Inkscape, but as soon as I save it to .eps the white background comes back. Here's a .png export from Inkscape that shows the way the completed logo ought to look, but I'd prefer to have it in a vector format:

 

Any suggestions?

[firstdefence]

Could you not ask the designer to export as a transparent background or ask the designer which font was used to create the two letters slightly overlapped?

Having said all that, you already have what you want, in the PNG file you have uploaded.

This image has a transparent background, simply save it to your HDD and use it over any background you want.

[markw]

Why do you need this saved as an .eps file? as the sample file contains no vector elements.
To remove the white background that you have in the sample file you provided open it in APhoto and in the Menubar go to; Document > Transparent Background.
Then go to; Filters > Colour > Remove white paper.
Now Export the logo as a new .png file.
If you need the logo as a true vector file, then as previously suggested, contact the designer and ask them to send it to you in your preferred vector format.
Alternatively you could trace what you have with the pen tool in any Affinity app and recreate it that way or use an online or stand alone vector tracing app.

[firstdefence]

I think vectorising the letters and using a single colour would modernise your brand logo, like so.

Celeste Press Logo.svg

[loukash]

1 hour ago, markw said:

Why do you need this saved as an .eps file?

The only thing worse than EPS "logos" containing nothing but bitmap elements are "logos" sent as Word documents…  

1 hour ago, markw said:

contact the designer and ask them to send it to you in your preferred vector format.

^ This! (emphasis mine)
And in case the designer doesn't understand what you're talking about, I'd suggest to look for another designer.  

7 hours ago, ehbowen said:

I just can't get the white in this little square to go transparent and stay transparent

Depending on the size of your logo and the background color/image, you could also remove the white background "on the fly" by going to the Layers panel → Blend Options = the cog wheel button → Source Layer Ranges → Left node: In = approx. 80%, Out = 100% → Right node: In = 100%, Out = 0%.
That will make the white background transparent. This should work even in the CMYK color space, and if the logo size is small enough, the remaining thin near-white outline shouldn't matter in print.

The question remains:

7 hours ago, ehbowen said:

I re-export to .eps

Why exporting to EPS, of all things?

[loukash]

26 minutes ago, loukash said:

remove the white background "on the fly" by going to the Layers panel → Blend Options = the cog wheel button → Source Layer Ranges → Left node: In = approx. 80%, Out = 100% → Right node: In = 100%, Out = 0%.
That will make the white background transparent

Like this:

26 minutes ago, loukash said:

This should work even in the CMYK color space, and if the logo size is small enough, the remaining thin near-white outline shouldn't matter in print.

Exported as PDF (press ready without color profile), checked with Packzview:

[firstdefence]

While Blend Options is an ok technical exercise, the OP already has a better option without the ugly white fringing and paling of the colour that the blend options leaves as a residue.

The uploaded PNG file is just the one the OP added to the post and all Ive done is crop to the initials.

One more thing to note is when adding fx to a vector curve it will ultimately be rasterised on export but a flat design with no fx will enable export via SVG or PDF, I would consider EPS to be a legacy format and I'm surprised it's still used so much. 

[v_kyr]

9 hours ago, ehbowen said:

I've got the rest of the logo the way I want it, but I just can't get the white in this little square to go transparent and stay transparent when I re-export to .eps. I can get it to look the right way in Inkscape, but as soon as I save it to .eps the white background comes back. Here's a .png export from Inkscape that shows the way the completed logo ought to look, but I'd prefer to have it in a vector format

Well, as this is mainly a bitmap image (aka in EPS embeded pixel data), due to the applied FX like text effects, resaving it as an EPS won't give you any real vector data here, instead just again an embedded bitmap image portion inside an EPS code format wrapper. - In order to get real vectors out of that, you would need to vectorize/trace that image, but you will then probably loose that FX like text effects aka getting a flat representation of that, or a bunch (a lot) of different color yellow shades vector layers which won't look exactly like your initial bitmap image.

When keeping the whole instead as an bitmap image, removing the white from the image and exporting the whole as a PNG image file is easily done with/in APh ...

... by removing the whites from the image (... first rasterize the image layer and then apply "Filters > Colours -> Erase White Paper" on the pixel layer). Or alternative and maybe even easier, after rasterizing the logo image to a pixel layer, do apply/check on from the top menu "Document -> Transparent Background". - Then afterwards save the whole as a PNG image to keep the background transparency ...

• CP logo color.afphoto

Getting a good and effective (like applied FX effects) plain vector representation of that is more difficult here and also needs much more work and the help of dedicated external vectorization tools.

And as a last NOTE, dealing with the EPS formats generated from/by Adobe products and reused (exchanged) then with Affinity products, is at best always only mediocre. It's thus much better to use other vector formats here for exchange like PDF/SVG.

[loukash]

12 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

the ugly white fringing and paling of the colour that the blend options leaves as a residue

As noted, in this very case Size matters!™   

Whereas a PNG in a CYMK workflow may cause a slew of other problems. Speaking of "paling of the colour". And considering Affinity's known export issues…  

But yeah, there are many options to get the desired results.
For example, over the decades I have accumulated quite a collection of "logos" received from clients that I had to completely rebuild as vectors in order to be able to use them in my layouts. Particularly those I received as (*gasp*) Word docs…

[firstdefence]

48 minutes ago, loukash said:

Particularly those I received as (*gasp*) Word docs…

Them's were t'days me lad, a 12 hour shift at coalface 6 mile walk hom, feed 'tchickens, pigs and pigeons and sit daan at 'tcomp only to be confronted by a .doc wi a wavy triple stroked art text fora logo, it were enough to blow me cap off.

[loukash]

2 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

it were enough to blow me cap off

As long as the client has paid for the extra time I had to spend, I don't actually mind.  

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[ehbowen]

5 hours ago, firstdefence said:

While Blend Options is an ok technical exercise, the OP already has a better option without the ugly white fringing and paling of the colour that the blend options leaves as a residue.

The uploaded PNG file is just the one the OP added to the post and all Ive done is crop to the initials.

One more thing to note is when adding fx to a vector curve it will ultimately be rasterised on export but a flat design with no fx will enable export via SVG or PDF, I would consider EPS to be a legacy format and I'm surprised it's still used so much. 

Forgive the newbie question, but does AfIll import .svg? I did save the entire logo in Inkscape just the way I wanted it in .svg format, but then I couldn't import it into the program I was using to design my temporary book cover (Scribus). I tried to open it with Affinity Illustrator but it seemed that it didn't recognize the file format.

[firstdefence]

There are some formats of SVG that Affinity Designer (Not Affinity Illustrator ) will say it does not support and I've had this before too. SVG file format is written as code, the code can be viewed in a text editor, the code can be written in different ways to represent the same object and some of the ways the code is written can cause problems for Affinity and other apps trying to interpret that code.

Could you upload the Inkscape SVG file so we can take a look at it for you?

[v_kyr]

Usually the Affinity apps can open (File -> Open...) and import (File -> Place...) common plain SVG files, meaning here, as far as the SVG code contains SVG commands and attributes the Affinity SVG parsers knows to deal with.

As an example open this SVG logo file in ADe and inspect it's vector layers (additionally open it in a webbrowser for comparison and with a text editor to inspect the SVG XML code) ...

• SVG_logo.svg

 

[ehbowen]

21 hours ago, firstdefence said:

There are some formats of SVG that Affinity Designer (Not Affinity Illustrator ) will say it does not support and I've had this before too. SVG file format is written as code, the code can be viewed in a text editor, the code can be written in different ways to represent the same object and some of the ways the code is written can cause problems for Affinity and other apps trying to interpret that code.

Could you upload the Inkscape SVG file so we can take a look at it for you?

Sure. Let me see if I can find it.

Celesta logo color-mod.svg

[v_kyr]

Looks Ok for (re)usage in ADe ... etc. - Here the related by ADe generated SVG for that ...

• ADe-Celesta logo color-mod.svg
• Celesta logo color-mod.afdesign

[ehbowen]

58 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Looks Ok for (re)usage in ADe ... etc. - Here the related by ADe generated SVG for that ...

• ADe-Celesta logo color-mod.svg
• Celesta logo color-mod.afdesign

All right. I was using Scribus because I prefer Linux over Micro$haft, and I couldn't (initially) open the .svg object in either Affinity...Designer (sorry 'bout that!) or Scribus. So I went the .png route. Next time I'll see about using Designer from the start.