Remove white background

[tatatrikoz]

I have an illustration in black made of multiple curves. And there are also some areas of white background which I want to get rid of. Is there any way to do it fast?

In Illustrator I would select all and then use "divide", then "select by color" and delete. Done. But I failed to do the same in Affinity. 

Can anybody explain how I can do this?

Thanks!

[Pšenda]

6 hours ago, tatatrikoz said:

to do the same in Affinity

"Erase White Paper" in Affinity Photo.

[Aammppaa]

It looks as if your illustration is a bitmap image, rather than a vector drawing. In which case Divide in Affinity will not work as this is a Boolean operation for vectors.

But you can change the blend mode of the black illustration to Multiply in the Layers panel.

[tatatrikoz]

1 minute ago, Aammppaa said:

It looks as if your illustration is a bitmap image

It is a vector image

[Aammppaa]

OK, well the Multiply blend mode will still work.

You should be able to Divide the shapes via Layer > Geometry > Divide or the Divide icon on the main toolbar.

This is not available if the selection is a Group. In which case you need to Ungroup.

It would be helpful to see what is inside the illustration layer / group. It could be as simple as selecting and deleting a single shape.

Can you share the file?

If not can you take a screenshot with of the layer panel with the illustration expanded to show its contents?

[tatatrikoz]

Thank you for your help!

I need to completely remove this white color, not just blend it with background color. I need background to be transparent. 

I ungroup, then Divide becomes active but it doesn't do anything. Looks like it still doesn't work properly.

The file is big and consists of big number of small shapes, black and white (please don't ask me why). So I can't just delete them manually. Maybe there are too much shapes for Affinity? But both Illustrator and Corel do the job perfectly in no time at all.

I attached a small peace of the image so you can have an idea.

99.eps

[Aammppaa]

Yikes! I see the problem!!

Affinity doesn't currently have tools to select based on colour (it is a frequently requested feature).

So I can't think of a way of achieving this other than manually.

Update: Just tried using XOR rather than Divide on your sample section of the illustration, and it seems to work!

However, it took ~6 minutes to calculate, so I dread to think how long the whole image would take.

The Boolean tools are due a complete rewrite in Affinity, and it has been suggested this is more likely to happen now that Publisher is (almost) out the door.

[StuartRc]

mmm..Yikes!....

Hi, may not be what you want but

1. Select all the objects (Select all) and create group in layers. This will then allow your to manage the adjustments

2.Select Adjustments then 'Channel Mixer' from using adjustments at bottom of the layers panel

3. From the 2 dropdowns Select Grey and Alpha respectively

4 Drag the intensity all the way to black (-200) 

This should expose the background or colour of the artboard to whatever it has been set

 

 

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, tatatrikoz said:

Thank you for your help!

I need to completely remove this white color, not just blend it with background color. I need background to be transparent. 

I ungroup, then Divide becomes active but it doesn't do anything. Looks like it still doesn't work properly.

The file is big and consists of big number of small shapes, black and white (please don't ask me why). So I can't just delete them manually. Maybe there are too much shapes for Affinity? But both Illustrator and Corel do the job perfectly in no time at all.

I attached a small peace of the image so you can have an idea.

99.eps

When you go to the document settings, select the color tab and there click on the transparent background checkbox, mostly background parts of that image will get transparent.

Though not all, since other parts are drawn in white on top of black there, meaning if you would make those white curves just transparent the underlayed black comes through.

So you would have to apply a bunch of geometric subtract operations in order to get rid of those here, which is a Sisyphean task in AD. - Also note that the plain EPS format usually doesn't support any transparency per se, it's more like something is drawn or not here.

Since that image has been initially vectorized (as bitmap to vector) with Vextractor, I would have looked if that tracing tool possibly has some other vector export options for setting transparent area handlings then.

[tatatrikoz]

9 hours ago, Aammppaa said:

Update: Just tried using XOR rather than Divide on your sample section of the illustration, and it seems to work!

This works! Thank you so much! It took 2 hours for the big illustration though haha

[tatatrikoz]

Thank you to everybody, problem solved!