Showing Scale bar in technical image/illustration?

[AffinityNewbie7]

I have been using AD for the past week and am already in love with it! Big thanks to Serif for developing the software for such a small price.

I do lots of technical illustration or microscopy image editing where I need to show the "scale bar" of the image. Is there a way to do that in Affinity Designer or Photo?

For example, I have the below image that I would like to crop and edit, then put the scale bar in the cropped/edited image at the same pixel scale.

 

[John Rostron]

If you have your image and your scale both at the correct magnification and, provided you do not resize either of these, then  you can crop and edit them as much as you like. I would presume that they are on separate layers.

John

[AffinityNewbie7]

7 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

If you have your image and your scale both at the correct magnification and, provided you do not resize either of these, then  you can crop and edit them as much as you like. I would presume that they are on separate layers.

John

Both the image and the scale bar is in the same layer and at the correct magnification, so resizing the image resizes both properly.

How do I redraw the new scale bar based on the old one? Which software should I use, AD or AP?

[John Rostron]

You could use either. I would begin with your existing image as background. Then add a layer containing a rectangle scaled to the same size as your current one. Then add a fill, the same as your original white (or different should you wish). Then add a Text item (either Artistic Text or a Text Box) with a suitably-sized font and colour. The font size will probably have to be trial-and-error! You might then like to group the scale bar and the Text item. Having the scale bar as its own layer means that the fill could be changed for a differently coloured image. Similarly for the text.

John

[AffinityNewbie7]

Thanks for the tip, can I use Affinity Designer to crop, edit and adjust TIFF images? Or should I get Affinity Photo to do that?

[v_kyr]

Depends on the degree of TIFF image manipulations you have in mind here beside cropping and adding those "scale bars". Both apps can deal (import/export) and showup TIFF files, so if you are only going to add those "scale bars" you can do that and simple bitmap based operations in Affinity Designer too.

However if you plan to do more advanced bitmap image manipulations with TIFF files, Affinity Photo would offers more image manipulation functionality here.

[AffinityNewbie7]

3 hours ago, John Rostron said:

I would begin with your existing image as background. Then add a layer containing a rectangle scaled to the same size as your current one.

How do I measure the length of the existing scale bar? I need to first know the length in pixels, the rest is easy.

[v_kyr]

6 minutes ago, AffinityNewbie7 said:

How do I measure the length of the existing scale bar?

1. Load/place your TIFF image into AD
2. change to the pixel persona
3. select the scale bar with the rectangle selection tool
4. read the shown pixel values from the right side inside of the transformation panel

[AffinityNewbie7]

8 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

• select the scale bar with the rectangle selection tool

 

I could not find it, do you mean the Rectangular Marquee tool?

[v_kyr]

Yes a rectangular one. -> Marquee Selection Tools

[firstdefence]

1 minute ago, AffinityNewbie7 said:

I could not find it, do you mean the Rectangular Marquee tool?

Yes

[John Rostron]

46 minutes ago, AffinityNewbie7 said:

How do I measure the length of the existing scale bar? I need to first know the length in pixels, the rest is easy.

What I had in mind was that you draw your rectangle directly on top of the existing scale bar. No need to measure anything then.

John