cocoazenith Posted May 23, 2017 Share Posted May 23, 2017 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gdenby Posted May 23, 2017 Share Posted May 23, 2017 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. Quote 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alfred Posted May 23, 2017 Share Posted May 23, 2017 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. Quote Alfred Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gdenby Posted May 23, 2017 Share Posted May 23, 2017 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. Quote 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimmyJack Posted May 23, 2017 Share Posted May 23, 2017 two options spring to mind: 1 ) FX > Color Overlay. Pick any color you want: spot, 100% one of the process colors.... whatever. 2 ) Draw a box (large enough to contain the artwork) with fill set to your desired color. Place brush work in mask position. David Edge 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cocoazenith Posted May 23, 2017 Author Share Posted May 23, 2017 Yes, it's a stock textured brush from Affinity Desinger 1.5. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gdenby Posted May 23, 2017 Share Posted May 23, 2017 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. Quote 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cocoazenith Posted May 23, 2017 Author Share Posted May 23, 2017 I think i'll just draw/copy the rough edges manually with the tablet. Then convert the stroke to basic one, expand it and Add the edges to this expanded shape. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cocoazenith Posted May 24, 2017 Author Share Posted May 24, 2017 afffinityyyyy I f••••g need a roughen edges tool. stop making me having to ask ppl with AI to do that for me andy-in-mke 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dutchshader Posted May 24, 2017 Share Posted May 24, 2017 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. test edge.zip gdenby 1 Quote intel core i5, 16GB 128Gb ssd win10 Pro Huion new 1060plus. philips 272p 2560x1440px on intel HD2500 onboard graphics Razer Tartarus Chroma Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gdenby Posted May 24, 2017 Share Posted May 24, 2017 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. edge test.png Pretty nice. I haven't messed w. brush making much, but this reminds me to get back in practice. Quote 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JimmyJack Posted May 24, 2017 Share Posted May 24, 2017 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). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lorox Posted August 25, 2020 Share Posted August 25, 2020 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... loukash, Jowday and Pixie 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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