Affinity Photo messing up printing white paper

[Christopher O'Toole]

Hello. We have a problem when printing graphics exported from Affinity Photo. (Printing with a Brother MFC-L3780CDW)

When we create graphics in Affinity Photo, weird backgrounds print on the white paper, and you can clearly see them in the images I’ve provided.

This only happens when we print things made with Affinity Photo. We may print anything unobstructed by the weird backgrounds if it hasn’t been touched by Affinity Photo.

This happens with a transparent background, and a white background. With JPG and PNG exports.

What is going on? Is there some setting that needs changed or something?

We are using Affinity Photo version 1.10.8 on a fully updated (macOS Sonoma 14.2.1) 13” MacBook Pro.

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, Christopher O'Toole said:

This happens with a transparent background, and a white background. With JPG and PNG exports.

What is going on? Is there some setting that needs changed or something?

We are using Affinity Photo version 1.10.8 on a fully updated (macOS Sonoma 14.2.1) 13” MacBook Pro.

Hard to tell without seeing an according APh document from which this happens then.

[Christopher O'Toole]

3 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Hard to tell without seeing an according APh document from which this happens then.

What is an API document and how do I get it?

[R C-R]

20 minutes ago, Christopher O'Toole said:

What is an API document and how do I get it?

You were asked for an APh document, not an "API" one. If you place the cursor over that underlined abbreviation, a popup will tell you it means Affinity Photo, so what is requested is an AP native file format document, one ending with the .afphoto extension.

[Christopher O'Toole]

4 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Hard to tell without seeing an according APh document from which this happens then.

Here is the .afphoto file

problem_1.afphoto

[lepr]

4 hours ago, Christopher O'Toole said:

Here is the .afphoto file

problem_1.afphoto 802.49 kB · 3 downloads

The Pixel object named "pardon our dust" is not absolutely transparent in its non-text pixels; its pixels which you may think have alpha 0, actually have alpha 2.

[HVDB Photography]

Make the 'pardon our dust' layer active
Go to menu:  Window > Channels
The problem becomes clearly visible when you successively click on the red, green and blue composite channels

[firstdefence]

Don't use screengrabs to create labels, use properly formatted text and good quality graphics. For each of the products you have you can make a reusable asset that contains the product name, ingredients, website address and logo, once you have all of the assets it's simply a drag and drop process to create a sheet of labels, you can even have ready made label sheets ready to print, you can copy and paste the text from the website into Affinity so all you have to do is format the text.

[Christopher O'Toole]

6 hours ago, HVDB Photography said:

Make the 'pardon our dust' layer active
Go to menu:  Window > Channels
The problem becomes clearly visible when you successively click on the red, green and blue composite channels

Thank you! How do I make that layer active?

When I right click on it, there is no way to make it active.

And there is no way to hit a button and do it (that I see at least).

 

[firstdefence]

You simply turn it off by clicking on the eye to the right.

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

You simply turn it off by clicking on the eye to the right.

@Christopher O'Toole, for more about using the Channels panel, refer to its help topic. This link is to the V2 version but the options & settings are the same for V1.

[HVDB Photography]

1 hour ago, Christopher O'Toole said:

Thank you! How do I make that layer active?

just click on the thumbnail of that layer > turns bleu = active

[lepr]

The real problem is in the alpha channel of "pardon our dust". As I said before, its pixels which should have alpha 0 actually have alpha 2, and so ink is printed faintly where the paper should be clean.

Here is the document with an additional Levels adjustment which reduces alpha from 2 to 0 (other solutions are available), and it should print OK: problem_1 adjusted.afphoto

 

[Christopher O'Toole]

12 hours ago, firstdefence said:

You simply turn it off by clicking on the eye to the right.

Thank you. Every time we’ve printed the failed files, the alpha channel is enabled.

I honestly don’t understand most of what is being said in this chat, I’m not that familiar with Affinity Photo.

Every time someone tries to tell me how to fix it, I can’t seem to replicate what they’re saying on my end...

[v_kyr]

7 hours ago, Christopher O'Toole said:

I honestly don’t understand most of what is being said in this chat, I’m not that familiar with Affinity Photo.

Every time someone tries to tell me how to fix it, I can’t seem to replicate what they’re saying on my end...

Then you should make yourself more familiar with APh, maybe by reading through it's online help and/or looking through some video tutorials about it.

• Affinity Photo 2 - Online Help

• Official Affinity Photo (V2) Tutorials

• ... etc.

[firstdefence]

7 hours ago, Christopher O'Toole said:

Thank you. Every time we’ve printed the failed files, the alpha channel is enabled.

I honestly don’t understand most of what is being said in this chat, I’m not that familiar with Affinity Photo.

Every time someone tries to tell me how to fix it, I can’t seem to replicate what they’re saying on my end...

@lepr is giving potential solutions so have you tried printing out the example document lepr has posted?

To demonstrate what lepr has done watch the video below, in it I demonstrate how the area that is causing problems isn't white, it's off white as shown by readings from the colour eyedropper sampling. lepr has corrected that by using a levels adjustment filter set to the alpha channel and then black adjusted by 2% to whiten the off white areas that show up when printed as pale discolouration.

• Q. Which of the Affinity Apps do you have?
• Q. How do you make these labels?

 

[lepr]

12 hours ago, Christopher O'Toole said:

Every time someone tries to tell me how to fix it, I can’t seem to replicate what they’re saying on my end...

If you had responded to my posts instead of ignoring me, I would have given you further explanation.