Improve support for blend modes in Affinity Designer

[JacobTheDev]

I was recently working with an EPS file provided to me by a client which uses the "multiply" blend mode for shadows on an icon. I was surprised to see that Affinity Designer, while supporting blend modes, decided to rasterize the shadows, and cut the paths oddly (the path underneath the rasterized layer was cut exactly where the rasterized portion began). I had to have a colleague open the file in Illustrator and export it as an SVG, and even then the blend mode wasn't applied to the shadows; it just showed as a black to white gradient; I was able to re-apply the blend modes after making the edits I needed and exporting to SVG, by manually adding the background-blend-mode CSS on to the appropriate elements.

It seems to me that Affinity Designer doesn't handle importing blend modes very well, and appears to be completely lacking support for background-blend-mode, a CSS property which is used in SVGs.

Please improve importing blend modes from other file formats, and add support for background-blend-mode. I've attached the original EPS as well as my cleaned up SVG for reference.

logo-nssra.eps

logo-nssra.svg

[MEB]

Hi JacobTheDev,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

The EPS file format does not support blend modes or transparency, so they are rasterised on export by Adobe Illustrator. Those features remain editable in Illustrator because it embeds proprietary Ai data in the EPS file and that is what it uses/loads when it opens the file. Since that Ai data is proprietary we are not able to load it as Illustrator does, only the EPS data. This also happens with any other third party software.

[JacobTheDev]

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. There's no way to add support for that during the import process?

[MEB]

No, It's the format that doesn't support these features so when we open an EPS file these features were already rasterised - we have no way to know how the resulting rasterised image was created.

Why don't you try a more recent format like PDF. It supports way more features than EPS.

 

Regarding the SVG it's also a good alternative but since we don't support SVG effects on import (they don't translate directly to Affinity Layer effects) some things may be lost.

[JacobTheDev]

Ah, alright, I understand. Unfortunately, I don't always have control over the file formats that get provided to me, but when possible I'll try requesting a PDF in the future. Thanks!