Comic Book Support

[Nixart]

Comic book tools could feel right at home in Publisher with its Designer and Photo integration. Speech bubble tools with linking could be useful. The panel creation tools in Clip Studio could be instructive.

[Medical Officer Bones]

Stick with Clip Studio for now: Photo does not, and will not ever (according to Andy Somerfield, Photo lead developer), support 1bit bitmaps - perhaps only export. And Publisher is unable to export 1bit bitmaps for high resolution line art, and converts these to CMYK or RGB files.

In short, unusable for most comic book printing jobs. At least, Publisher will hopefully be able to support 1bit bitmap PDF export at some point. Photo will never be optimized for comic print workflows, sadly.

If the comic art is full colour 'painterly' style without line art, however, Affinity will work just as well as other software. Or possibly create your digital inks using vectors only.

Reference:

 

[Guyon]

I don't understand what  1bit bitmaps  is, or why it is so important.  But if APub can be used to create print magazines why can't it be used for comic books?

[Jens Krebs]

1bit images are pure black and white images with only one colour (black) -- no greyscale, no shades, no gradients, no RGB, no CMYK, just plain black and white.

[Nixart]

I'm more interested in web comic exporting and full color/greyscale prints like you would for a picture book. Don't really care about 1 bit for what I'm working on.

[Medical Officer Bones]

As long as you don't need crisp bitmap-based black 800-1200dpi printed line art (inks) for print, and you can work at 300-400dpi for print, you'll be fine with Affinity and comics.

If your only output target is web, you'll be fine too.

 

[Jens Krebs]

Correct -- but this thread is about what you call line art and the fact that the Affinity Suite cannot do it (yet?).

[fde101]

Adding support for an assortment of hash pattern and halftone pattern fills would be nice. as well, and largely related to this request.

[dcrosby]

Huh? I can’t import line art into any Affinity program? Seems odd. What am I gettin’ old or something?

[Medical Officer Bones]

Of course you can import line art. The trouble is that for comic printing a high resolution 800-1200ppi 1bit bitmap (tiff) is generally used for line art which is then overprinted on the 300-400ppi colour work.

Affinity Photo cannot deal with 1bit bitmaps at all at this point, while Publisher can import these, but during export they are converted to CMYK.

Line art should not be greyscale continuous tone, because it just won't print well (actually looks dreadful).

[fde101]

5 hours ago, ErrkaPetti said:

But, halftone fills is already there into Affinity Photo, or?

Where?

There are bitmap fills so I suppose you could take a bitmap of a halftone pattern and include it.

There is also the halftone filter but that is hardly the same thing...

I'm talking about patterns that can be selected the way you would select a gradient or a bitmap fill, but entirely vector and based on a built-in pattern generator of some kind, where there might be a customizable library of preset patterns built using parameters such as dot size, shape and separation, screening angles and the like.

Line patterns based on selecting the thickness and distance of the lines, their angle, possibly a second or third set of lines with a potentially different thickness and distance and at a different angle overlapping the first...

 

This would really be more of a Designer feature, but no reason it couldn't be in Publisher as well (or even Photo for that matter).

[RM f/g]

Part of my work is in the archaeological field. Drawings of finds are 99.9% drawn in ink on paper, scanned and eventually saved as 1-bit, 1200 ppi tiff.

Placed in books, magazines these drawings should output to 1200 ppi, 100% black, high res images. No downsampling, no halftone screening.

Another disappointment.

[dcrosby]

14 hours ago, RM f/g said:

Part of my work is in the archaeological field. Drawings of finds are 99.9% drawn in ink on paper, scanned and eventually saved as 1-bit, 1200 ppi tiff.

Placed in books, magazines these drawings should output to 1200 ppi, 100% black, high res images. No downsampling, no halftone screening.

Another disappointment.

Agreed.

[dcrosby]

So I imported a bitmap file into Designer. The document color is Gray/8. There is nothing in the file other than that bitmap image.

I export the image as a grayscale tiff. Open the tiff in PSD and it is a grayscale image as expected.

Now I export a PDF of the same file. I set the Color Space to Gray and the Profile to Black and White. Open the PDF in Acrobat Pro and the Output Preview shows it is CMYK. Same thing happens when I start with a grayscale image.

Someone tell me I missed something because it seems as if I can't export a grayscale image (one printing plate) to PDF for print.

[Nixart]

On 6/27/2019 at 7:08 PM, fde101 said:

Adding support for an assortment of hash pattern and halftone pattern fills would be nice. as well, and largely related to this request.

This would be amazing. Could be expanded to general seamless pattern tools. I'd love to see something like Blender's Array Modifier or Houdini's Copy and Transform node, but in 2D to create a dynamic array or grid of vector shapes. Again, this would be ideal in all Affinity apps.