High Resolution Dumbed Down on AD

[Boppa]

I love using Affinity Designer but I recently discovered that when I take a high resolution .png file and drag it into my artboard, the color depth & vibrance and resolution is dumbed down. This was only just discovered when I had proofs printed at the printer company. Please see photo comparison below. Image on left is original, on right is in AD.

I am wondering if I have some settings wrong when creating my artboard? Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Uncle Mez]

Hi @Boppa very strange as I never tried to print from AD but make sure you create a print project them create artboard in it. 

Also please study color theory and concept before printing. 

If RGB is okay, I would suggest you make sure CMYK is selected it's even safe to work that way. 

Other guys here surely have better astuces to fix this than I do. 

[Boppa]

Thank you for your reply Arnaud.

I am actually not printing from AD. I am simply assembling the artwork from my commissioned artist onto kids greeting cards template that I created in AD. Then exporting to .pdf which the Printing Company requested. The artboard is set to cmyk as well. The above pictures are from my computer screen using a snippet tool. The strange thing is that if I do the same thing in AI, when saving to .pdf... it is also somewhat dumbed down. However, when I export to .psd in AI, everything is perfect. I was just hoping that AD would do this effectively, as it is much easier program to use.

[Uncle Mez]

Nice to read. 

Try and make sure you increase the dpi at least to 300dpi or more. 

To put myself out of troubles I always use 600dpi or 1200dpi when it comes to printing. 

Also ask the printing company what type of CMYK they are using. 

Have realized there are couple of different CMYK's type out there

[Boppa]

Gotcha... the weird thing is... back in december, I sent the print shop (by accident) two cards in .psd. They converted it to pdf and printed test proofs for me to review. They looked beautiful. So i assumed that exporting to pdf with AD would work ok... but then realized the high rez png was being dumbed down. The print shop wants file as 300dpi.

[R C-R]

The PNG file format does not support the CMYK color space, so if your Affinity Designer document is using CMYK, the png file must be converted from RGB to CMYK when dragged into it. That is probably why the colors are not as vibrant.

[Uncle Mez]

2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

The PNG file format does not support the CMYK color space, so if your Affinity Designer document is using CMYK, the png file must be converted from RGB to CMYK when dragged into it. That is probably why the colors are not as vibrant.

Hi @R C-R can you please share with both of us how you do that?

This is new to me and can be a life saving technic for many.

Thanks !

[R C-R]

10 minutes ago, Arnaud Mez said:

Hi @R C-R can you please share with both of us how you do that?

If you mean how it is converted from RGB to CMYK, the app does that. I think it uses one of the (more or less) standard lookup tables, but others probably can give you better answers.