Why do I have to rasterise images to prevent bad image quality in exported pdf..

[Bo Lovenhjelm]

Placed images in AP seems to have some sort of "odd" low resolution to them even if the image itself is large and has a very high resolution.
Now, here is a right-click option with the choice to "rasterise" image. doing this makes the placed image look right again.

If exporting document to pdf without first rasterising all images, one by one, results in a pdf containing images with very poor quality.
On the other hand, if one rasterises all images in document before export, image quality in pdf file is excellent.

This is an issue for me, as rasterising image seems to lock image size as well as quality. making it impossible to scale image size up without loosing quality.
Also rastering all images one by one in a multipage document takes a lot of time.

Would it be possible to make AP rasterisie ALL images automatically on export to pdf?
That way I'd retain the freedom to scale image up and down within original image size boundaries and still have a perfect image quality result in exported pdf.

[A_B_C]

I would guess this is a problem of your export settings. Usually, there is no need to rasterise your images before export. I would suggest that you try the following. Place an image in your document, go to File > Export > PDF, click the More … button in the export dialogue, adjust your image resampling and compression settings, and have a look if it makes a difference. 

[Bo Lovenhjelm]

No, the issue has nothing to do with that, I always has these settings for print.
Have a look at Affinity's own brochure. I've duplicated their own graphics and rasterised the bottom one via right clicking option.
This does not only affect graphic quality on screen but also when exporting to pdf no matter what DPI settings.

Maybe I should point out that I've been working with print for about 30 years, all the way back to Aldus Pagemaker 

I've attached 2 dumps so you can see the difference.

 

 

[A_B_C]

Oh, please don’t mind my post. The export settings are just the first place to look when something goes wrong during export. 

I can reproduce your observations with the Affinity Live logo on screen, when I go to Preferences > Performance > View Quality and select Nearest Neighbour (Fastest). You could try Bilinear (Best Quality), and see if it makes a difference.

[A_B_C]

However, I have a hard time to reproduce your findings when exporting to PDF. Would you mind sharing an example document and your export? 

[Bo Lovenhjelm]

Hmm, seemes like the tip U gave me about changing settings from "Nearest neighbour" to "Bilinear" solved all my problems both with screen rendering and image quality in exported high resolution pdf.

THANK YOU!

 

[A_B_C]

I don’t know why it worked for the export … but it’s good to hear that everything is fine now … 

(BTW, Pagemaker was also among the first applications I used. Does anyone remember Calamus on Atari? Or Ragtime on the Macintosh II? We created our high school newspapers on these systems. )

[mac_heibu]

Of course, @A_B_C, I remember both!

Ragtime actually is commiting suicide with exorbitant prices for micro updates.

Calamus — how I loved this application! In many ways it was more powerful in those days than most actual layout applications (softRIP to delete a single screening dot on output, image editing directly within the layout application, …).

But: My absolute favorite: „Didot“, later named as „DA‘s Layout“ by Günter Kreidl and Peter Egger of Digital Arts.