Bitmap Color Format

[FloppyKing]

I work at a printing company and we're looking into acquiring Affinity Photo to replace our aging PhotoShop CS2 that we use to process artwork from customers and convert it into a format that can be imported by our main design program used for production (Mecca2000 http://www.amgraf.com/pages/m2k1.html).

 

Mecca treats bitmap tiffs differently than grayscale tiffs and displays them on screen with the white portion of the image being transparent which makes them easier to work with when things overlap and they take up much less file space, but if they're grayscale (which seems to be the closest Affinity Photo can do) they display with the white background to the image with no transparency and every operation on them takes longer than it would in monochrome and certain options like raster tracing aren't available to grayscale images.  This comes up quite frequently for us when we're printing solid single color customer logos.  The limitations of the aging Mecca program aside, we need to be able to convert an image down to bitmap color mode and export a "monochrome" tiff in Affinity Photo like we can in photoshop.

 

In photoshop the mode menu has an option for Bitmap which then brings up a dialog with different options for how to convert it down to an ONLY black or white image (no levels of gray in between).  Below are images showing where this mode option and subsequent bitmap dialog are in photoshop as well as images of where i expected to be able to find them in Affinity Photo, but couldn't.  It may well be that Affinity Photo can already do what i need it to and i'm just missing something due to my inexperience with the program, in which case i'd be grateful if someone could point out how to output a bitmap/mono tiff.

 

PhotoShop:

  

 

 

 

 

Affinity Photo:

  

 

 

[FloppyKing]

sorry i see that this feature request has already been made.  Prior to posting was mistakenly searching for "monochrome" instead of "bitmap" to see if anyone else had already posted about it.  I was searching for monochrome because that's what our mecca program calls the bitmap mode images.  Seems like we just need a 1-bit color mode option based on other threads.  Hope this is something that can get implemented because until it does we can only use Affinity Photo as a supplement to our PhotoShop CS2 instead of a true replacement like we need.

[FloppyKing]

I think my post still has merit though since I've included images showing where the option is in PhotoShop and i've also described another use case where this option is a necessity.  Perhaps an admin can merge my post into the below thread?

 

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/23232-1bit-bitmap-mode-colour-format/

[Medical Officer Bones]

There aren't that many alternatives on the market that feature good support for 1bit images.  Even if they do support 1bit, most features tend to be turned off (Photoshop can't even deal with layers or effects in 1bit mode). The only exception to this rule seems to be PhotoLine, which does a quite admirable job, and layers, vectors, many live effects, adjustments, layer masks, an so on actually work as expected in 1bit mode. It's quite impressive, really, because there is no need to convert to 1bit mode: it all works live. Almost feels like working on an old-fashioned 1-bit CRT monitor of old.

It would be great if Affinity Photo could provide us with a similar level of 1bit support in the future.

But for now perhaps consider PhotoLine in combination with Affinity to solve your 1bit workflow.

[FloppyKing]

On 4/28/2018 at 3:22 AM, Medical Officer Bones said:

There aren't that many alternatives on the market that feature good support for 1bit images.  Even if they do support 1bit, most features tend to be turned off (Photoshop can't even deal with layers or effects in 1bit mode). The only exception to this rule seems to be PhotoLine, which does a quite admirable job, and layers, vectors, many live effects, adjustments, layer masks, an so on actually work as expected in 1bit mode. It's quite impressive, really, because there is no need to convert to 1bit mode: it all works live. Almost feels like working on an old-fashioned 1-bit CRT monitor of old.

It would be great if Affinity Photo could provide us with a similar level of 1bit support in the future.

But for now perhaps consider PhotoLine in combination with Affinity to solve your 1bit workflow.

 

For our particular purposes we don't need to be able to apply any effects once in 1-bit color mode since we're not really doing any "design" on these types of images but are instead just opening up an already completed design file and just saving it in a format our other program will accept for solid single color artwork (1-bit TIFF).

 

That said... Thank you for the recommendation.  I did try it out and you're correct it does a great job at handling 1-bit color mode and is able to successfully output the files in the format we need.  I do wish it would show a preview though when selecting the different dithering options to convert to monocrhome.  Photoshop doesn't do that either, but still it would be nice.  If it gets to the point where we need to abandon PhotoShop then we'll definitely be pursuing PhotoLine since with Affinity all we really need PhotoShop for is the 1-bit color mode stuff.  Ideally Affinity Photo would handle this itself though so we're not stuck using two separate programs

[Petar Petrenko]

+1

[midsummer]

Now that Affinity Publisher is around the corner, it would be very strange if the suite of programs didn't get 1-bit bitmap support at some point, although it still doesn't seem to be on the public roadmap. I often need to work with screen printed CD and DVD labels, which all require bitmaps and spot colors. Every design job I get also involves placing barcodes and logos in printed materials, and around half of these logos are bitmaps too.

I know that everybody's always grumbling about that one particular feature they'd like to have and take personal offence if it's not immediately available. But I find the lack of 1-bit color space a really fundamental (and perplexing) flaw, since it's so essential in professional design work, and the Affinity applications are so versatile and mature otherwise. I like Photo and Designer, but currently they are little more than curiosities for me, since I can't fully use them in my workflow. I have to stick to my old Adobe CS5 applications for now.

(The lack of threaded text boxes in Designer is another major bummer, by the way.)

[doodledude]

+1