How to release clipping masks in Affinity Designer?

[Guest]

Hi everyone,

I recently switched from Illustrator to Affinity Designer.  And one thing I do pretty often with my work is extract vectors from PDFs.  My typical workflow in Illustrator:  open up the PDF, right-click the graphic that I want to extract > "Release Clipping masks" then delete the emptied masks.  I do this so I can disassemble the graphic and re-colour/manipulate it as needed.

In Adobe Illustrator it's as simple as Right Clicking the object > Release Clipping Mask.  Alternately you can go through the 'Object' toolbar option > Clipping Mask > Release. Screenshot of this in action.

But no such options appear in Affinity Designer.  it should be a pretty simple function, but I can't seem to find it in this program.  So how do I release Clipping masks in Affinity?

[Callum]

Hi An_Actual_Cat,

 

Welcome to the forums

 

Please see the below video it should show you how to do what you are looking for

 

C

 

Unclip.mov

[Guest]

Hi Callum- thank you for recording that video and posting it up.  It's a bit more work than right click > release, but does the job.  Thank you again for your help.

[Carelli]

Hi all, I'm new to Affinity Designer as well, I have a similar issue with an imported SVG image. There's literally hundreds of masks, and I would like to know if there's a way to release them all at once (the video posted by Callum is not available anymore apparently).

Thanks for your help!

[Aammppaa]

I was able to view Callum's video, but it didn't show anything more sophisticated than dragging an object out of a clipping mask in the layers panel.

I can't see that helping with hundreds of clipped objects.

Is your SVG file something you can share? Then others might come up with a viable method.

[Carelli]

10 hours ago, Aammppaa said:

I was able to view Callum's video, but it didn't show anything more sophisticated than dragging an object out of a clipping mask in the layers panel.

I can't see that helping with hundreds of clipped objects.

Is your SVG file something you can share? Then others might come up with a viable method.

Thank you Aammppaa, sure, I am attaching an example of the image I would like to process (it's for a scientific publication)

The problem is that - after I ungroup the elements in the figure to modify it (resize, recolor, align...) - they are split into individual curves or rectangles, and each has its own mask. Using Illustrator I could simply use the Direct Selection Tool, but I'm struggling to do the same in Designer. Specifically, when I select more then one object, the bounding box extends far beyond the selected area, and I can't simply align or modify multiple elements at once.

Thanks for your help!

igv_snapshot.svg

[Aammppaa]

What a horrible file! So many tiny elements made AD struggle on my machine.

I was able to clean things up by using the Select Same feature that is in the new 1.9 beta.

1. Open the SVG and ungroup everything.
2. In the layers panel select one of the clipping masks.
3. Select > Select Same > Fill & Stroke.
4. Delete all the selected clipping masks.
5. Clean up remaining objects by hand.

[Carelli]

Fantastic, that's exactly what I was looking for, thank you so much for your help! And yes, these files are really a pain, but unfortunately they're pretty standard in the field so I have to rely on them...

[Aammppaa]

Glad to have helped 😀