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Posted

Whenever I open a scanned bitmap image (only black and white pixels) in Affinity and edit it, it will be saved as a greyscale TIFF.

For print this will lead to the image being rasterized. The result won’t be as sharp as if I would produce a PDF with a black and white high resolution bitmap.

Adding a bitmapping tool to Affinity Photo would be a great addition!

To illustrate the resulting difference, I enclose an image.
Left: not rasterized bitmap Right: greyscale, hence rasterized
(Scans from Pictoperanto by Jochen Gros)

Pictoperanto.png

Posted

Your comment is confusing.

  • a bitmap file or layer is already rasterized. 
  • greyscale has nothing to do with rasterization, it does not cause rasterization per se.
  • Affinity has its own document format, normally not tiff.
  • you can edit tiff files or save as tiff files instead of using the native document format, but this is generally not advisable except you need it for a very specific use case (DAM). Affinity may use a totally different encoding within the tiff container vs the source file.
  • so the loss of sharpness can be caused by the edits you make, the way of storing the document, or other factors which typically are unrelated to the document format used.

it is unclear what you mean by bitmap tool.

Affinity has a pixel tool, but you need to take care about position integer alignment, layer DPI and use of merge down.

Mac mini M1 A2348 | MBP M3 

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LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 | Dell 27“ 4K

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

I use iPad screenshots and videos even in the Desktop section of the forum when I expect no relevant difference.

 

Posted

I’m not talking about rasterized in screen pixels, but the rasterizer of the printer and the printing press.

A bitmap file, as it comes from the scanner is only black or white pixels.
Even if I open such a file with Affinity Photo, and safe without changes, it becomes RGB.
As soon I edit the file and export it as 8 Bit grayscale TIFF, it is handled differently by the rasterizer.
Compiling it into a PDF will handles it similar to a grayscale image, downsample it and print it raterized.

The biggest competitor to Affinity Photo has a Bitmap tool, that offers different ways of rasterizing images.
This might not be important for web designer, but if Affinity wants to get people that produce print products as books and posters, such tools are crucial.

At least they should implement a bitmap export.
Or the much requested image tracing function.
That way one can convert a scanned line drawing into a sharp outline.

 

Screenshot 2025-02-03 at 15.53.16.png

Screenshot 2025-02-03 at 15.56.06.png

Posted

Ok, makes it a bit clearer that you are talking about 1 bit color depth export.

The terms bitmap and raster are used differently throughout Affinity apps (and documentation in online help) and just means layers with any bit depth >= 8, times number of color channels plus alpha., except vector layers (which never the less may get a bitmap fill), and rasterization (resampling) to create bitmap / pixel layers.

Unfortunately Affinity staff stated repeatedly since day 1 that it has no plans to implement 1 bit document format. Export was promised in 2019, but never showed up (at least until February 2025)

Any imported 1 bit documents get always converted to at least 8 bit color depth. Imported here means opened or placed or rasterized for further editing, not only limked as ressource

 

 

 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | MBP M3 

Windows 11 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 | Dell 27“ 4K

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

I use iPad screenshots and videos even in the Desktop section of the forum when I expect no relevant difference.

 

Posted

 

 

 

 

 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | MBP M3 

Windows 11 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 | Dell 27“ 4K

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

I use iPad screenshots and videos even in the Desktop section of the forum when I expect no relevant difference.

 

Posted

Thanks for specifying this. 1 bit bitmaps indeed.

Ok, good to know. What is the reasoning?

Not caring about book designer, that definitely like to control how images will be brought to the page?
It is impressive what the developer team at Affinity has put together by now, but such details make all the difference for professional designers.

Posted

I’ve added some links (in above posts) to older requests and the developer statement.

The promised 1-bit export never came (6 years and counting since 2019, oldest request from 2014)

IMG_2218.jpeg

Mac mini M1 A2348 | MBP M3 

Windows 11 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5 | Dell 27“ 4K

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

I use iPad screenshots and videos even in the Desktop section of the forum when I expect no relevant difference.

 

Posted

There you go. An export would already be enough in most cases.
At least for editing b&w scans.

Thanks for sharing all the links.
Und grüß mir die gute alte Hanse!

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