Export question during evaluation

[Jim Gordon]

We have used Adobe Fireworks for years for making graphics for our website and social media pages.  We have been evaluating software to replace Fireworks and Affinity Designer is a strong candidate because it seems intuitive to use and does the simple things we need to do.  We have however run into some snags and the biggest one is exporting images.

We commonly export our graphics to web compatible formats and as an example, we are used to seeing a size of 64K or less for a 500x500px image from Fireworks.  Something we would use on the web or social media.  The size I am seeing on from Affinity Designer is around 1 meg.  Now, I admit I have not been through all the tutorials yet but this is a big deal for us.  Our website is large and we try hard to keep images as small as possible.  Please, someone, tell me I am not going about this the right way or there is a better way!  Help appreciated.  

[Patrick Connor]

@Jim Gordon

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

Is your export format JPG (which you used as a tag but not in the words of your post). When exporting JPG, have you tried adjusting the quality slider?

[Jim Gordon]

On 1/28/2019 at 11:40 AM, Patrick Connor said:

@Jim Gordon

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

Is your export format JPG (which you used as a tag but not in the words of your post). When exporting JPG, have you tried adjusting the quality slider?

Thank you for your response.  Yes, I am exporting a .jpg and yes I did try changing the quality slider.  We generally export from Firefox from 60-80% of the original and when I tried this through Affinity Designer even going much lower than 60% the size is much larger.  I am assuming it is something I did but need to verify this works before we decide to purchase the product.  

[John Rostron]

23 hours ago, Jim Gordon said:

Thank you for your response.  Yes, I am exporting a .jpg and yes I did try changing the quality slider.  We generally export from Firefox from 60-80% of the original and when I tried this through Affinity Designer even going much lower than 60% the size is much larger.  I am assuming it is something I did but need to verify this works before we decide to purchase the product.  

I take it that you mean Fireworks, not Firefox. Since you are using Designer, I would guess your artwork is mainly vector. Jpg is not ideal for this. Have you tried exporting as PNG? It could be that PNG-8 is sufficient for your needs and could well give a smaller file. In the Export dialogue, you can choose the image size (in pixels or percent) and the resampling/rasterizing algorithm so you can choose whichever gives you the best result.

John

[walt.farrell]

It might help if you could give us a sample .afdesign file that experiences this problem when you export it.

[ChanceUm]

I'm experiencing the same thing that Jim mentioned. My old copy of Fireworks CS3 exports a clearer image with a much smaller file size for png, jpg, and gif.

[MEB]

Hi ChanceUM,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
There's still some work to do in this area. Currently exported files are not really optimised for web. There's plenty of third party utilities (quite a few freeware) you can use to optimise the files exported by Designer/Photo simply by dragging them over these apps. We also hope to implement slice previews as in Fireworks so you can see how the file will be exported without actually export it. Take a look at Designer's roadmap for more details/features.

[R C-R]

13 hours ago, MEB said:

There's plenty of third party utilities (quite a few freeware) you can use to optimise the files exported by Designer/Photo simply by dragging them over these apps.

The one I use is ImageOptim, a freeware app for Macs. It works very well, includes several easy to set preferences, & can be used as a Mac OS picture Service for quick right-click access (or optionally with a keyboard shortcut set in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services). There is also a CLI interface if you are into that sort of thing.

For other platforms, their https://imageoptim.com/versions page has some links to alternatives but I don't know anything about them. 

[MEB]

There's quite a few apps based on different optimisation algorithms, some offer better results for specific formats than others.

[Jim Gordon]

On 1/31/2019 at 12:42 PM, John Rostron said:

I take it that you mean Fireworks, not Firefox. Since you are using Designer, I would guess your artwork is mainly vector. Jpg is not ideal for this. Have you tried exporting as PNG? It could be that PNG-8 is sufficient for your needs and could well give a smaller file. In the Export dialogue, you can choose the image size (in pixels or percent) and the resampling/rasterizing algorithm so you can choose whichever gives you the best result.

John

John,

My mistake yes I meant Fireworks.  I have worked out the issue for the most part.  This all has to do with when you create a new file I believe.  Being inexperienced I selected one of the presets.  When I choose custom and create the image at the desired size and export it the results are fairly acceptable.  The file is still larger but may be manageable.  PNG files result in a larger file.  I will attach just a couple of samples I used for testing.  One is from Fireworks exported as .jpg and the other from Affinity Designer.  As you can see in the Fireworks example we typically import a couple of small images as well that I have not inclued in the Affinity Designer example.  Thank you for your help.

test.afdesign