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Affinity Photo - Color Separation


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So I've been looking, and can not find any info on color separation for Affinity Photo.

 

I am working at T-Shirt Press Shop and am looking to replace the Photoshop with Affinity. 

 

My main reason for not switching is that I am trying to separated colors into different channels. I cant find this solution in Affinity Photo. 

 

So my questions is there a way to do this? I see a channel tab but have no clue on how to create my own channel from the colors that I have selected. 

 

Thanks

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Not sure if this helps but.... In the Channels studio tap the 3 dots to the right of the channel layer you want to create. In the menu is an option to Create Spare Channel (based on your selection. The new layer can then be loaded in a number of ways using the 3 dot menu next to the new spare channel.

M1 IPad Air 10.9/256GB   lpadOS 17.1.1 Apple Pencil (2nd gen).
Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Affinity Design 1.10.5 
Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and betas.

Official Online iPad Help documents (multi-lingual) here: https://affinity.https://affinity.help/ 

 

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Do you mean separate colours into different 'layers' rather than 'channels'? Channels describe how colours are made up eg RGB (mix red, green blue to obtain desired colour.

You can Create different 'colours' on different layers for each part of the design quite easily. Show and hide layers as required to show the part off the designs colour to be screen printed. Is that what you are trying to achieve?

M1 IPad Air 10.9/256GB   lpadOS 17.1.1 Apple Pencil (2nd gen).
Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Affinity Design 1.10.5 
Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and betas.

Official Online iPad Help documents (multi-lingual) here: https://affinity.https://affinity.help/ 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/16/2018 at 3:57 AM, D_Redtrooper said:

So I've been looking, and can not find any info on color separation for Affinity Photo.

 

I am working at T-Shirt Press Shop and am looking to replace the Photoshop with Affinity. 

 

My main reason for not switching is that I am trying to separated colors into different channels. I cant find this solution in Affinity Photo. 

 

So my questions is there a way to do this? I see a channel tab but have no clue on how to create my own channel from the colors that I have selected. 

 

Thanks

Ya can't!  LOL.  Affinity Photo is in no way whatsoever a Photoshop replacement.  I've been experimenting with it myself and Affinity Photo is just for creating artwork or making pictures pretty.  It may be possible to separate in layers but in the end you would still need to convert them to channels for printing or sending to an outside RIP.

 

The reviewers are saying "its better than photoshop" or "I replaced photoshop" then when I get it and try it out it is no where near Photoshop.  LOL 

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To be fair it is in early development stage for AP. PS has been under development for how long?

M1 IPad Air 10.9/256GB   lpadOS 17.1.1 Apple Pencil (2nd gen).
Affinity Photo 1.10.5 Affinity Design 1.10.5 
Affinity Publisher 2, Affinity Designer 2, Affinity Photo 2 and betas.

Official Online iPad Help documents (multi-lingual) here: https://affinity.https://affinity.help/ 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

This would be at nice feature to have. Just have to say though... Yes, Affinity lacks some features Photoshop has (and some relatively minor features missing in the iPad version) which can be annoying to work around. But I think the interface is fundamentally better and for almost everything it's comparable and often superior. Given the stage of development I'm really excited to see where this ends up 5 years from now - it will probably look a lot like the desktop PC market, now that tablets and phones have taken over. The scaffold in there, they just need to finish filling in details, and focus on the interface and core functionality, not endless bells and whistles that are often not of general use (the direction Photoshop has gone - why is frequency separation still clunky?).

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  • 3 months later...

I think indeed color separation is needed, for not only t-shirts printing at a bunch of companies, as OP said, also for other print related gigs/tasks. As well, I have not been able to find a way to get a convert dialog with settings (dithering in rendering intent (to activate it or not), and if converting with perceptual, absolute, relative,  level of ink, etc, etc, etc) when converting from RGB to CMYK, but this thing is surely due to I bought an AP license very recently, I had used AP beta intensively, but not for that particular matter. I might just have not yet found my "AP style" path to it (you know, good apps do the same, just with buttons in different places).  These things tend to be very important for pro work. (I think the brush engine revamp is just as important, as these days is a total need for too many projects, not just pure illustration (my main field now)). To me though, the color mode conversion settings are probably more important of the bunch (I can paint in other apps, but cmyk/print stuff... very few good apps for this, being AP/AD among the best options) together with PDF export (which seems well covered, till the point I've been able to check already).

AD, AP and APub. V1.10.6 and V2.4 Windows 10 and Windows 11. 
Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM,  RTX 3060 12GB, Wacom Intuos XL, Wacom L. Eizo ColorEdge CS 2420 monitor. Windows 10 Pro.
(Laptop) HP Omen 16-b1010ns 12700H, 32GB DDR5, nVidia RTX 3060 6GB + Huion Kamvas 22 pen display, Windows 11 Pro.

 

 

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Honestly, I was able to separate like I normally would with a little bit getting to know Affinity Photo (and can do it in Designer as well). The only thing missing for me is being able to halftone like in Photoshop and exporting in Bitmap (BMP) format.

It's completely possible and honestly better in my opinion to separate in layers to avoid channel sep color shifting in the example of using CMYK to grab plates. 

I would like to see halftone abilities like that of Photoshop in the near future, otherwise being able to control the angles and dot size of our manual Ripping is out the window. :(

 

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On 8/15/2018 at 3:26 PM, Sullyman said:

"Honestly, I was able to separate like I normally would with a little bit getting to know Affinity Photo (and can do it in Designer as well)."
Can you elaborate on this - particularly for Designer? If I was going to guess how you accomplished it, I'd say to put each color on its own layer and then turn each to black pantone and then turn on and off the layers to print each "color" 

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 8/15/2018 at 2:26 PM, Sullyman said:

Honestly, I was able to separate like I normally would with a little bit getting to know Affinity Photo (and can do it in Designer as well). The only thing missing for me is being able to halftone like in Photoshop and exporting in Bitmap (BMP) format.

It's completely possible and honestly better in my opinion to separate in layers to avoid channel sep color shifting in the example of using CMYK to grab plates. 

I would like to see halftone abilities like that of Photoshop in the near future, otherwise being able to control the angles and dot size of our manual Ripping is out the window. :(

 

Now, just to be clear, I am not referring to doing a separation with solid colors or some mild halftones. Similar to the ones you can achieve in Illustrator, I am referring to doing a full 6 color separations. Like the ones used on multi-colored photograph or panting. I have attached one that we did of someone's painting if it helps. Are you able to do the same in Affinity Photo/Designer? I dont see how that would be possible with using just layers. 

sep

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On 9/5/2018 at 3:16 PM, D_Redtrooper said:

Now, just to be clear, I am not referring to doing a separation with solid colors or some mild halftones. Similar to the ones you can achieve in Illustrator, I am referring to doing a full 6 color separations. Like the ones used on multi-colored photograph or panting. I have attached one that we did of someone's painting if it helps. Are you able to do the same in Affinity Photo/Designer? I dont see how that would be possible with using just layers. 

sep

The attached file didn't have an extension... I added the .afphoto and it opened an image with a opossum?

And yes, I'm referring to 6,12 or any number of hues/colors for that matter. But the 6 major hues are generally where I start and can be done in layers, inside of Affinity Photo or Designer.

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  • 3 months later...
On 9/7/2018 at 5:04 PM, D_Redtrooper said:

Sorry about that. Here is the file that I created. This is a .psd file. 

How can you see how much color would show thought another color? Like when creating purple for example? Do you have some type of effect over the layer that gives you a good representation of how it would print? 

Ogden_Capture_2_Print.psd

Sorry @D_Redtrooper, hadn't realized you posted a reply.

Here's the quick sep's I created from the file. There are plenty of tools to separate in AD and AP respectively, I'm more pushing for the previews and halftone abilities for manual ripping now. 

The updated beta has some performance enhancements for pulling plates. 

Ogden_Capture_2_Print_SEPS.afphoto

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Cool, I see the separation. How were you able to pull those colors in those specific plates? 

I did notice the sep that you sent, that resolution is lower then what I had sent. Is that a by-product of separating the colors? 

Let me know if this makes sense. 

 

I really appreciate the time and effort on this. 

 

Thanks

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On 12/21/2018 at 12:38 PM, D_Redtrooper said:

Cool, I see the separation. How were you able to pull those colors in those specific plates? 

I did notice the sep that you sent, that resolution is lower then what I had sent. Is that a by-product of separating the colors? 

Let me know if this makes sense. 

 

I really appreciate the time and effort on this. 

 

Thanks

Realistically, if you're a novice then trying to get software not made for complex color seps to achieve something usable, is like learning a subject in a class that is being taught in a foreign language.  If you knew how to do color seps, then you could mess around with software like this and see what's possible.  If you don't know how to do color seps, your best option is to give the print to a shop that has it's own art dept, or you could try one of the various automated systems that "attempt" to produce a good set of seps, but with those, you pretty much always need to have some skills to edit the initial results that they generate.

Having said that, Serif's older programs like DrawPlus and PhotoPlus are somewhat better equipped for this kind of work since they were created in a time when print was king and it was the beginning of the whole desktop publishing explosion.  The Affinity products have different goals, and different features.

I've spent time experimenting with all of these programs to see what they have to offer.  I can get any of them to do basic seps.  Complex halftone separations is a different story.  Even if I could do it, the amount of time necessary makes it impractical.  If you want to learn color separations, use software that is made for this task.  The oldest possible copy of Photoshop or Illustrator are fully loaded for this work.  I'm talking, vintage 1990's software.  The next best thing is CorelDraw and Corel Photo-Paint.  Not as good for this work as Adobe, but still having real tools specifically for color separations.  Serif's Affinity programs will likely never stray into that territory.  Not unless do it yourself t-shirt printing suddenly becomes very popular in the world.

I may spend some time playing around with that rat print and see what I can get.

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Hi Kuttyjoe

 

Thanks for the feedback. I actually already know how to do color separations. I'm well versed in it in both photoshop and illustrator. Since I am new to Affinity, I was hoping there was a way to do them similar to the Adobe products. 

 

But from what I am seeing, I don't believe Affinity is really made for it. 

 

Thanks Again tho. 

 

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  • 1 month later...

Was this ever resolved? It would be nice to have a way to separate in Photo. Affinity Photo has an enormous amount of potential. I would think separating is defiantly doable even calculating channels (by selection) with what Affinity has provided. I’m automating what I can right now in the windows version to make a basic simulated Process separation macro. But I do miss basic quick indexing a lot. :)  I’m with Sullyman, once we get that far, we still have to port the Layers (not spot channels) over to Photoshop to RIP them one way or another. Having a way to halftone opaque frequency and angle ellipses would be killer. Even dots. 

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Hi Steveyates,

This has not been resolved. I tried it out and have yet found a good way to separate them properly. 

Not to mention the issue you would have once separated and rip=ing them properly. As you said, you would still have to bring it in Photoshop to do that. 

Sigh, maybe one day it will be a reality. As of now, I can't seem to find a good solution to it. If bitmaps were available then I think there would be a good chance to it. 

 

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On 12/21/2018 at 12:38 PM, D_Redtrooper said:

Cool, I see the separation. How were you able to pull those colors in those specific plates? 

I did notice the sep that you sent, that resolution is lower then what I had sent. Is that a by-product of separating the colors? 

Let me know if this makes sense. 

 

I really appreciate the time and effort on this. 

 

Thanks

The low resolution was just for uploading quickly.

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  • 1 year later...

I'm in the same situation. Been doing colour separations for T-shirts for over 25 years.  So have downloaded APhoto and ADesigner to test and see if they compete with PS and AI combo. 

With few clicks things are not looking good. I see there is no support for Multichannel PSD files. APhoto can't open them.  I use these for full colour Simulated Process separations. They contain many halftone spot channels, sometimes up to 12-15 cols. If I covert the multichannel doc to greyscale or CMYK, it will open in A Photo, and the extra separation channels are visible in the channels palette. However I cant click or view them, all I can seem to do it delete them? Not much use. In photoshop I can access these channels and work on them with curves and all the other tools in the tool box. Then output.  

The above processes are not just for DIY T-shirt print shops. This is how the whole garment print industry works around the world. From the small to the huge factories . -Unless they are using DTG printing-. 

Apparel Screen printing is a massive global industry. 

The above issue would also affect the whole off the offset CMYK print industry as their seems to be no support for Bump plates to add to a CMYK separation. ? or is there ? 

Noted on the comments to use layers instead of channels. But this would be a nightmare for output. You would need to output each layer on it own for all colours. ? 

Ive tried to attached a screen shot of an example but the upload fails every time sorry. 

Thanks 

jc 

Edited by Sinoseps
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2 hours ago, Sinoseps said:

The above processes are not just for DIY T-shirt print shops.

Same problem with illustrations, when you need to check colours easily for books to look the same. Not being able to check plates/channel or having half backed channel don't help.

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+1 for this request, not only is very important per se for a very large industry, is also that I collect a lot of feedback about it: People outside the community are also asking for these capabilities when the Affinity name gets suggested.

AD, AP and APub. V1.10.6 and V2.4 Windows 10 and Windows 11. 
Ryzen 9 3900X, 32 GB RAM,  RTX 3060 12GB, Wacom Intuos XL, Wacom L. Eizo ColorEdge CS 2420 monitor. Windows 10 Pro.
(Laptop) HP Omen 16-b1010ns 12700H, 32GB DDR5, nVidia RTX 3060 6GB + Huion Kamvas 22 pen display, Windows 11 Pro.

 

 

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  • 3 months later...

Finally Resolved!

Simulated process seps now available for Affinty Photo. Color Separation AP is avaiable at Etsy. https://www.etsy.com/listing/848986958/color-separation-ap-for-affinity-photo?ref=shop_home_feat_1

Check out the videos below. Let me know your thoughts I’d be happy to help.

Thanks

Steve

Overview video

 

Trailer video

 

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