Colour selection, quantity reduction, and management. Inline/outlines.

[Selwynio]

Hi, total newbie to this software, and forum.

 

Looking at my xmas project being getting to grips with this software.

 

I've had a designer using Ai doing all of our graphic work over the last couple of years, and have been impressed with what she can do with it.

 

Previously when I was doing all of the artwork (which in the grand scheme of things is quite basic) I used a program called WinPCsign.

A pretty basic vector program, but it saw me well for a few years. Laterly I complimented that with a program called VinylMaster XPT.

 

Because of it's basicness, WINPC SIGN was really fast to use. Vinyl master, a lot less intuitive.

 

However, Vinyl Master had a fantastic, almost priceless tool........................

 

We manufacture 2 products that compliment each other, and are bought as a package. Half of the product is made using printed vinyl. and the other half is sublimated fabric.

 

We would design the whole package of products and once approved by the customer we would have to recolour to 2 different palettes

 

Our Artwork all gets reduced down to between 4 and 20 colours (we have 4 shades of - green, blue, pink, purple, grey, orange, yellow, a couple of browns, golds, reds, and Black)

 

So if we are working with much more complex designs, where there is lets say 10 shades of Blue, then we just simplify the artwork down to 4 shades of blue.

 

.........................the Vinyl master feature was great. If you marquee any part of the job and hit 'S' on the keyboard, you get a pop up in the centre of the screen and the box says 'Select object by colour'.

 

It then lists every colour in the portion of the job selected.

 

If we had just vectorised a piece of artwork and it picked up dozens of colours, we could then tick as many as we want and turn them all to 1 shade, select a few more, change those to 1 shade. This was great for reducing the number of colours right down. Unbelievably helpful, and helped eliminate many errors.

 

The other thing that was great about that feature is as follows (remembering we are outputting effectively to 2 final pallettes)

 

Our pallet was in 3 sections - section 1 was the initial artwork build............

 

Blk

Bl1

Bl2

Bl3

Bl4

Red

Gry1

Gry2

Or1

Or2

 

etc etc

 

Section 2 for sublimation looked exactly the same but with the letter S at the end of each swatch.

Section 3 for Vinyl printing looked exactly the same but with letter V at the end.

 

This feature made selecting all, of lets say, 'Bl2' - and then changing those elements to 'Bl2 V', or 'BL2 S', so very easy and quick and almost fool proof.

 

Can someone tell me if there is a feature like this in Affinity, and if not, how to achieve this end result easily.

 

Second, and last question for now is......In Win Sign, I have an inline and outline tool. So if I build a square on the screen 500mm x 500mm, I can easily apply an inline or outline of 100mm to that. Do I have both inline and outline in Affinity.

 

Thanks for reading, and any help on this.