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Hello all,

 

So I have to send the print file to the printing house and need an art brush stroke I created to be only 1 color.

 

The brush preset has all sorts of tints and the printing house returned it and told me they need it 1 color only.

 

I only need it for it's rough edges. I tried expanding the stroke so that I can fill it with only one color but that's not possible in AD. I made the stroke normal and expanded it but I cannot apply a roughen edges effect to it now because it does not exist.

 

Please Affinity...

 

Anyone have a workaround to my problem?

 

! Attached is a zoom on the brush.

post-40203-0-84428600-1495529912_thumb.png

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My guess from what you wrote is that the stroke was made w. a textured vector brush. Those are strokes created by dragging a monochrome bit map, in this case, a grey scale, over a vector. The edges of the shape cannot be expanded because they are not vectors. They have various tones by design. 

 

Assuming the stroke is a vector stroke, here's a work around that might do the job. Select the curve, and set the blend mode to multiply. Copy and paste it repeatedly on top of itself. My strials need 10 or more copies for the stroke to turn to a solid rough edge black. Those I was able to export as .pdf, .eps, .svg, etc. If for some reason you need actual vector outlines, use an exported tiff, and run it thru an image vectorizer. There are online services available, very inexpensive dedicated app, or freeware Inkscape, tho' it is a bit more complicated to use.

iMac 27" Retina, c. 2015: OS X 10.11.5: 3.3 GHz I c-5: 32 Gb,  AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 Mb

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Huion WH1409 tablet

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My guess from what you wrote is that the stroke was made w. a textured vector brush. Those are strokes created by dragging a monochrome bit map, in this case, a grey scale, over a vector.

 

The thing is, the "grey" in the OP's zoomed-in screenshot isn't greyscale. My screen colour picker tells me that it's RGB [100, 95, 90] (or thereabouts, depending on exactly where I pick the colour from).

 

Edit: Come to think of it, I'm not sure that the above observation is terribly relevant, since the printing house isn't going to be outputting to RGB: they just want something that rips to a single plate.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
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The thing is, the "grey" in the OP's zoomed-in screenshot isn't greyscale. My screen colour picker tells me that it's RGB [100, 95, 90] (or thereabouts, depending on exactly where I pick the colour from).

 

Edit: Come to think of it, I'm not sure that the above observation is terribly relevant, since the printing house isn't going to be outputting to RGB: they just want something that rips to a single plate.

 

Yes, it looked sort of greenish to my eyes, but much closer to grey scale than something like sepia or indigo tone.  FWIW, I tried the work around starting with a pale tan stroke, and it took over 20 copies to approach solid black.

iMac 27" Retina, c. 2015: OS X 10.11.5: 3.3 GHz I c-5: 32 Gb,  AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 Mb

iPad 12.9" Retina, iOS 10, 512 Gb, Apple pencil

Huion WH1409 tablet

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I went back and looked at some of my work around results. Turned out that when I zoomed in quite a bit, I could still see traces of grey, not pure black. When I put some into the vectorizer, and did a little adjustment w. the parameters, I could get pure black all thru, w edges that were more or less smooth, depending on the parameter settings.

 

Attached, the original .png quadrupled on the right, exported, and the vectorized output on the left.

 

post-34886-0-72590500-1495562644_thumb.jpg

iMac 27" Retina, c. 2015: OS X 10.11.5: 3.3 GHz I c-5: 32 Gb,  AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 Mb

iPad 12.9" Retina, iOS 10, 512 Gb, Apple pencil

Huion WH1409 tablet

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maybe using a solid texture brush will give just one color.

i have made one and it looks like there is only one color used.

 

attachicon.gifedge test.png

 

Pretty nice. I haven't messed w. brush making much, but this reminds me to get back in practice.

iMac 27" Retina, c. 2015: OS X 10.11.5: 3.3 GHz I c-5: 32 Gb,  AMD Radeon R9 M290 2048 Mb

iPad 12.9" Retina, iOS 10, 512 Gb, Apple pencil

Huion WH1409 tablet

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I guess I misunderstood what you were looking for. Like Alfred, I was thinking a single color separation.

 

If you want a solid color using an existing brush, can't u just use a Levels (or Curves) adjustment on the alpha channel?

The closer the black/white slider values are to each other the less antialiasing you will have.....i.e. 18% black and 18.1% white will basically have no gray value.

 

Original brush.

Solid spot color with antialiased edge.

Pure 100% black channel only version with no aliasing.

and Applied to a square.... spot (aliased) and rich black (non aliased).

 

post-12544-0-02108100-1495653648_thumb.png

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  • 3 years later...

In my opinion this discussion highlights an issue with Designer that is unfortunately the reason why I'm very glad to still have an older version of AI on another computer.

To do really versatile 100% vector artwork Designer needs to have REAL vektor brushes like AI has (and had for ages...) – Designer's so called vector brushes so far are just pixel patterns following a vector path. Accordingly they cannot be expanded and subsequently act as any other vector object (with all their inherent advantages) on the canvas.

Somewhat related is the issue that you cannot "roughen" or likewise alter/stylize the vector path in Designer in ways that some of Illustrator’s "Effects" (and some tools from the tool bar) do so convincingly. These features are so helpful in many cases when vector objects tend to look just too clean or sterile – and their usage leaves it all vector whereas Designer's vector brushes just add pixel properties to the vector path.

I'd so much like to rely entirely on the Affinity Apps in general and Designer in particular but I keep finding that there are still quite a lot of non-missable features in (even 10 year old – and older – versions of) Illustrator that I just cannot do that so far without giving up ways of designing things for best effect (artistically and technically). Too bad, really...

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