Will Affinity version 1 Designer and/or Photo export 32 bit PNG with transparency please?

[William Overington]

Will Affinity version 1 Designer and/or Photo export 32 bit PNG with transparency please?

I have had a look and I have not been able to find any way to do that.

William

 

EDIT after two replies received. It was 32 bits in total, 24 bits for RGB colour plus another eight bits for the A channel. I had originally put 24 bit but I made a mistake, but I have now retrospectively changed it so as not to leave anything wrong in place.

Edited January 24 by William Overington
I made a mistake when I made the post

[v_kyr]

Quote

True color (24-bit)

All 16,777,216 colors (downscaled, click image for full resolution)

24 bits almost always use 8 bits each of R, G, and B (8 bpc). As of 2018, 24-bit color depth is used by virtually every computer and phone display^{[citation needed]} and the vast majority of image storage formats. Almost all cases of 32 bits per pixel assigns 24 bits to the color, and the remaining 8 are the alpha channel or unused.

2²⁴ gives 16,777,216 color variations. The human eye can discriminate up to ten million colors,^[15] and since the gamut of a display is smaller than the range of human vision, this means this should cover that range with more detail than can be perceived. However, displays do not evenly distribute the colors in human perception space, so humans can see the changes between some adjacent colors as color banding. Monochromatic images set all three channels to the same value, resulting in only 256 different colors; some software attempts to dither the gray level into the color channels to increase this, although in modern software this is more often used for subpixel rendering to increase the space resolution on LCD screens where the colors have slightly different positions.

The DVD-Video and Blu-ray Disc standards support a bit depth of 8 bits per color in YCbCr with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling.^[16][17] YCbCr can be losslessly converted to RGB.

MacOS refers to 24-bit colour as "millions of colours". The term true colour is sometimes used to mean what this article is calling direct colour.^[18] It is also often used to refer to all color depths greater or equal to 24.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth

[Dan C]

Hi @William Overington,

53 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Will Affinity version 1 Designer and/or Photo export 24 bit PNG with transparency please?

I can confirm that 24 bit PNG files with transparency aren't possible to create in Affinity, and I believe this is also true in most other applications.

A 24bit PNG image supports 3 colour channels, consisting of 8bits each - Red, Green & Blue (R,G,B).

The 4th channel that a PNG can support is the Alpha channel (A), which is required for exporting a PNG with transparency present. This creates a 32bit PNG image with R,G,B,A channels.

Therefore to create a 24bit PNG image with transparency present, you would have only 2 colour channels maximum in the file, ie R,G,A or G,B,A etc.

I hope this clears things up!

[William Overington]

Thank you.

I remember producing 32 bit RGBA graphic files.

Was it with Serif PagePlus?

William

 

[William Overington]

I realized that I had made a mistake in the first post in the thread, so I  have changed it. I changed it in the title of the thread too.

William

 

[walt.farrell]

As long as you mean 32-bit rather than 24-bit, yes, the Affinity applications can do that.

[William Overington]

Oh good.

How please? I could not find.

How does one access it please?

William

[William Overington]

I was looking in the export PNG dialogue and I could not fond anything like a checkbox for INCLUDE TRANSPARENCY. Maybe it is done a different way in Affinity products.

William

 

[Dan C]

When exporting to PNG from Affinity, the file will be automatically created as a 24bit PNG, if no transparency is present.

If you want to export from Affinity to a 32bit PNG, simply add any transparency to your document and this will be automatically created as a 32bit PNG.

Unfortunately there's no dedicated option to export a 32bit PNG file without transparency from Affinity at this time.

This has been recently raised and discussed further here -

I hope this helps  

[William Overington]

I am using the version 1 software. Does version 1 support PNG transparency?

I have tried looking in the Affinity Designer Help system but have not found anything about transparency yet.

Basically I have a picture on a sort of white background and I want to learn how to make a picture on a transparent background so that I can use the original picture as part of a new composite picture.

William

 

[Dan C]

Yes, Affinity V1 and V2 apps are exactly the same in this regard - provided the file being exported contains any transparency, the PNG will be exported as 32bit automatically.

17 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Basically I have a picture on a sort of white background and I want to learn how to make a picture on a transparent background so that I can use the original picture as part of a new composite picture.

Are you able to provide a copy of this picture, or your Affinity document so we can advise further?

There are many different ways to remove a background, so it's easiest if we can see where you are currently, and if you can provide a rough idea of what you may be hoping to achieve? 

[Patrick Connor]

In Designer (1/2) you can go to Document Setup and on the Colour tab set Transparent background. I think that makes exported PNGs have a transparent background to achieve what you want.

Other than exporting "Selection Only" there is no easy way to export a document that does not have an obvious transparent background as RGBA , as the "paper" (or artboard) is drawn to the file first for Export -> "Selection Area" and also for Export -> "Whole Document"

[William Overington]

Here is the file. It is a jpg at present.

William

 

[Patrick Connor]

well it will export as PNG, but nothing in that is transparent so RGB 24 bit and RGBA 32 bit will look identical. What do you expect to be transparent?

[Patrick Connor]

Here is a designer V1 document Lady.afdesign with your photo placed and rotated to prove a point. 

If you export the selection unrotated the JPG has no transparency so will not show any transparency in the exported file.

I have rotated it and exported the Selection Only, as a PNG and you will see the preview for the PNG shows transparency where you would expect even though this file has not got a transparent background. The exported result is Lady.png (attached)

I then imported that exported file Lady.png into Lady.afdesign to prove it worked.

 

Lady.afdesign

[William Overington]

20 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

In Designer (1/2) you can go to Document Setup and on the Colour tab set Transparent background. I think that makes exported PNGs have a transparent background to achieve what you want.

I have learned from that. Thank you. I have just made using Affinity Designer a transparent backed PNG item of clip art from a line sketch made with the Pen Tool.

Well, regarding the jpg file, perhaps I have asked the question in not the best way.

What I am trying to produce, as a learning example, is a line sketch in Affinity Designer using the Pen Tool of a part of an arboretum, with trees and shrubs, and then place the lady into the picture, then export as a bitmap image.

So I need to remove the "sort of white colour" background that is in the jpg file and then export it as a png with a transparent background. But at present I do not know how to do that.

William

 

[Dan C]

Thanks for providing that for me!

I'd personally recommend using Affinity Photo for this, as it contains more image manipulation and selection tools than Affinity Designer, making background removal easier in Photo.

These are the steps I've taken with your image:

1. File > Open and select the Image
2. Ensure the Layer is selected in the Layers Studio and is a '(Pixel)' layer.
   If this is not a (Pixel) layer, right-click the layer and select Rasterise.
3. Select the Selection Brush Tool from the left hand toolbar
4. On the Context Toolbar, enable Snap to edges and Soft edges
5. Using the tool, 'Paint' over the subject to create your selection. You can increase/decrease the brush size for finer areas, or use the ALT key to 'subtract' from your created selection area.
6. Once happy with the 'marching ants' selection around the subject, select Refine on the Context Toolbar
7. Using the Refine brush, paint along the edge of your selection where required, this will attempt to refine the selection further, based on the edgesin the image.
8. Once complete, select Apply in the Refine dialog.
9. You should now have a refined 'marching ants' selection around the subject. With this active, use Edit > Cut or CTRL + X.
10. Now, use Edit > Paste or CTRL + V to paste this to a new layer.
11. Navigate to Select > Deselect to remove this 'marching ants' section
12. In the Layers Studio, delete the original 'Background' layer. You should now find the subject remains, with a transparent background around her.
13. Using File > Export, export this to PNG using the PNG preset. This will save the transparency in the PNG file.
    You can now use this image in other documents, introducing it to the canvas with File > Place, and you should find only the subject can be seen, with transparent areas around her.

I've attached a quick screen recording showing this workflow below, alongside a copy of the .afphoto file saved with 'History', allowing you to Undo through the steps I took in the file.

 

lady_000.afphoto

I hope this helps get you up and running with your composite design 

[William Overington]

Thank you, Dan.

William