Affinity Not Converting to CMYK Profile

[mkpatrick6709]

I will rant for a minute. 

 

I have yet since purchasing Affinity 1 1/2 yrs ago been able to complete a project without running into continuous problems and having to spend too much emailing Affinity about them. I should be getting a paycheck for all the technical troubleshooting reporting I have done.

 

I experience a new problem each week that I use the software. I already reported 2 this week and today is the 3rd and it's only Tuesday. Has anyone noticed that the software is not saving the conversion to CMYK? I created 108 images. I chose the artboard to be CMYK. However, when I exported them and opened them back up to increase the DPI they were all RGB. Okay. So maybe I did something wrong I thought. So, I go to the document properties menu and choose color profile as CMYK => save then Export. Every last one showed in the History of the document that document properties were applied. Yet when I opened each up they all showed RGB. I did all 108 images again. The same thing above no conversion. They all opened as RGB and the software didn't ask if I wanted them converted to RGB. I just opened 4 images I had already saved on my system. I opened them they were RGB. I went to the Document properties => changed to CMYK => saved => Export. The history menu showed document properties applied. Yet when I opened them up they all showed RGB. I thought maybe when I close them out and it asks me to save, I need to select yes. I did. Guess what? No change. I am so sick of Affinity. If I could get a refund I would. I wanted a program I didn't have to pay a monthly subscription for but I am doing too much free labor using this software. 

 

I am selling products online that will be printed so the image must be in CMYK so that what customers see is what they get. However, thanks to Affinity. I will have to redo for about the 4th time over 120 images. I am p*ssed! This is not the first time I have had problems with the software. It doesn't even handle EPS and PDF properly. I'm just ranting because my expectation for this software is extremely low. Almost 2 years and not being able to do simple stuff is ridiculous. If anyone knows another app like Adobe that's not a monthly subscription please let me know. 

[walt.farrell]

What format are you exporting to, and exactly what Export settings did you use? 

You have mentioned Artboards and Images, but have not told or shown us anything about how you are using them.

Best would be to provide a sample .afdesign file, a sample image file, and an Exported file so we can see what you've done. These don't have to be your product files, just something equivalent for us to examine.

 

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, mkpatrick6709 said:

I go to the document properties menu and choose color profile as CMYK => save then Export. Every last one showed in the History of the document that document properties were applied.

An Affinity document and an export file may get different colour spaces & profiles set. To check or define the export colour setting press the "More" button at the bottom of the export dialog window. Depending on the selected file format it offers different colour settings … while not every image file format does support CMYK.

Unfortunately Affinity displays the option "Use document format" even for a CMYK document when PNG is selected as export file type – although PNG does not support CMYK. In this case Affinity will use that RGB profile for export which is set in your Affinity app preferences as RGB colour profile default.

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2 hours ago, mkpatrick6709 said:

I am selling products online that will be printed so the image must be in CMYK so that what customers see is what they get.

Just choosing CMYK as colour space does not ensure that users will see what they would get printed. A resulting colour appearance depends on various aspects, one is the colour profile and its handling in the print process (some processes even convert incoming data to RGB first before output in CMYK), another is the monitor of the clients of your online offer and a third their application to display your products.

Just consider, digital cameras always take pictures in RGB, not in CMYK. Accordingly RGB can be quite reliable for the impression of true colours – while CMYK may require extra software skills to appear as wanted on screen.

In the attached .zip is 1 .afdesign file (CMYK) + 1 exported JPG (CMYK) + 1 exported PNG (RGB). Drag the two image files into browser windows and compare the displayed colours with the view of the .afdesign file opened in Affinity. 

-- colours.zip

This screenshot shows the CMYK + the RGB image each in a in browser window, compared with the CMYK Affinity document below. Do you agree that here the CMYK jpg appears wrong?

[mkpatrick6709]

I don't know if you'll see the title of the images but I titled them what they are showing. I reopened a previously saved file that I formatted in CMYK but it shows it being RGB. I am providing screenshots of what the app shows and the process I go through to change a color profile and what the app shows me once I've done so. I also show how I got to the Export menu. I changed this image again to CMYK and the Document Properties show in the History. It also shows in the app.  Yet when I reopened it after Export, it was converted back to RG.

[mkpatrick6709]

They uploaded as followed:

1. Reopened After Save Now Showing RGB

2. Export Menu with Changed Color Profile to CMYK

3. Color Profile Changed to CMYK

4. Export Menu Unchanged

5. Previously Saved as CMYK not Showing CMYK but RGB

[thomaso]

As mentioned before, the PNG file type does not support CMYK – but Affinity documents do.

To export as CMYK and with transparency choose TIF or PDF.

[R C-R]

21 minutes ago, thomaso said:

As mentioned before, the PNG file type does not support CMYK...

So @mkpatrick6709 see for instance the Wikipedia entry for PNG, which says in part (emphasis added):

Quote

PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without an alpha channel for transparency), and full-color non-palette-based RGB or RGBA images. The PNG working group designed the format for transferring images on the Internet, not for professional-quality print graphics; therefore, non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK are not supported. 

There is no way around this -- if you export to PNG the file cannot use CMYK, period.

[mkpatrick6709]

Okay. Thanks for letting me know. Then we can delete this chain since it was me not being educated on the proper color profile for the file formats I was using. Thank you all for your help.