Jump to content
You must now use your email address to sign in [click for more info] ×

Recommended Posts

Hello, I’ve just downloaded Affinity Publisher (Beta) and am enjoying my first attempts. It’s a lot friendlier than Adobe InDesign, less fiddly, and reminds me of my favourite advert making program, MultiAd Creator, which is little known outside of the newspaper industry and is sadly now obsolete.

I appreciate the ability to choose from different colour spaces at the outset.

One of the many features that made MultiAd Creator so easy to use was that you could place a logo or piece of clip art, and then use a magic wand similar to the one in Photoshop to detect areas of uniform colour (most typically a white background), and erase them - Hey presto, your graphic would no longer be a rectangle, it would have its own shape and let whatever was underneath it show right around the edges. Sometimes this is known as transparency, but it has nothing to do with blending or opacity.

Q. I am wondering whether there is (or is going to be) a built-in way to create a clipping path / transparent background / alpha channel in a graphic after it has been placed?

InDesign does this but badly - no-one wants to see a ragged edge of white around the graphic afterwards. When done well it really is a very, very useful tool. The ability to remove backgrounds on the fly saves the designer from having to prepare each graphic in photoshop beforehand.

Edited by PadifyWales
typo
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello and welcome to the Affinity forum.

I have a question for you. What is the file type of the clipart you want to remove color from? Because let's say it is a .svg file. When you bring it in to Publisher, you can double click it so the embedded file opens in a new tab, and then you have control over the vector file right in Publisher. You can remove any objects you don't need, and then switch back to the first tab to view the changes.

If it's a pixel image, then I'm afraid there is no cut-out option as far as I'm aware. In that case, you would have to trace over the subject with the Pen Tool to create a colored vector object, and then in the Layers panel, drag it to the right of the layer's "thumbnail."

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you for the welcome, @Bri-Toon

Your comments are most informative, thank you. I didn’t know about being able to edit the SVG image. However, I was thinking more of a JPEG or TIFF - pixel images as you say. Tracing it with the pen tool is worth trying - thank you for the tip. I have also found that all white areas in a graphic can be removed by careful use the blend options sliders in the layers palette.

However, nothing beats the simplicity of a Creator-style 'magic wand' tool - click once on the surrounding background and it selects a contiguous area; hold shift and click again to add new areas, confirm and watch that background disappear! It’s my suggestion to the developers of Affinity Publisher... of course, very easy to talk about it, much harder to program it!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

I have also found that all white areas in a graphic can be removed by careful use the blend options sliders in the layers palette.

I was checking out the blend options as well hoping I could find something similar, but I'm not as familiar with them. Other members here could tell you more I'm sure.

20 hours ago, PadifyWales said:

However, nothing beats the simplicity of a Creator-style 'magic wand' tool - click once on the surrounding background and it selects a contiguous area; hold shift and click again to add new areas, confirm and watch that background disappear

Now is it just Publisher you have? Because there is integration for all of the Affinity applications. You can open a file in Publisher, and then click File > Edit in Photo. Photo has a tool very similar to the magic wand tool; Flood Select Tool, for you to remove that white space. And we can expect some surprise in a later build of Publisher because of their personas. 

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Staff

Hi PadifyWales,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
If you own Affinity Photo you will be able to switch to Photo Persona clicking in the respective icon on the top left of the interface in Publisher and use the tools available there to manipulate the logo as you see fit. This means access to filters, masking/alpha channels, Pen Tools , whatever necessary to remove the background from the logo (or whatever other operations you may want to perform).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thank you again Bri-Toon, and thanks @MEB

Good to know. I only have Publisher as yet but intend to get the other Affinity programs once I’ve rebuilt the mac in a day or two. I got conned with one of those unauthorised reseller clone jobs and it's now getting daily messages from Adobe about non-genuine software.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi MEB,

I didn't realize that the personas in Publisher are ready, because I get a message when I click on one saying that the feature is disabled until later on in the beta. And I own both Designer and Photo, and I have the latest betas.

The website is still a work in progress. The "Comics" and "Shop" sections are not yet ready. Feel free to connect with me and let me know what you like or what can be improved. You can contact me here, on my contact page, YouTube channel, or Twitter account. Thanks and have a great day!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Guidelines | We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.