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Copying image from Designer will only give lo-res version


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So here's my specific problem.

I have a Designer document, into which I have pasted a nice and (reasonably) hi-res photo.
Selecting the photo in Designer gives me the top-left info that its resolution is 900x1350 pixels.

Very good. But if I try to copy it...

...and paste it into another app (word, preview, photoshop) this will quite unexpectedly give me
1. a letter-sized blank frame/workspace, with
2. a centered version of the photo, at very low resolution.

For some reason, what's copied into the clipboard is a pdf (with its size set to portrait letter, which makes no sense since I'm cutting the photo from a landscape A4 document anyway) with a centered photo object whose resolution has been reduced to (in this case) 244x363 pixels, i.e. about a quarter of its original width and height.

Is there a setting to actually copy the selected photo in its entirety to the clipboard, not as part of a pdf but as the jpg it actually is?
Is this a bug or is it by design? (And if so, please explain to my why I want it...)

But most of all: Please help me cut my pasted pic out of Designer and into other apps, with the original size and resolution preserved — how can I do that?
 

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That’s a very interesting question expressoaddict.
I just tried it and got the same results as you.O.o
Copied a 1100x825px image from Finder and pasted it into Designer. All well and good.
Copied the resulting new image layer from Designer and pasted into Pixelmator. Image is now 264x198px
I wonder if what is actually being copied from Designer is the preview/thumbnail used in the layer stack and not the actual image as displayed on the canvas. Is this a possibility?

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7 hours ago, markw said:

Copied a 1100x825px image from Finder and pasted it into Designer. All well and good.
Copied the resulting new image layer from Designer and pasted into Pixelmator. Image is now 264x198px

FWIW, I placed a 1920 x 1278 px image into Designer & copied it to the clipboard, then pasted it into a new Pixelmator Pro document. I don't know if it makes any difference but I set both Designer & Pixelmator Pro to US letter size (8.5 X 11 inches) & to 300 DPI.

The pasted image was also 1920 x 1278 px, just like in Designer.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Hi expressoaddict (and everyone else in this thread)

This is working as expected, for example I've placed a 3024x4032 image into my document (as the top left shows), but it only occupies 199x264 pixels in the actual document. When it is copied to the clipboard it is copied at that resolution, so extracting a TIF and PNG from the clipboard (there are tools that allow you to see what's on the Clipboard) gives me a file that is 199x264  and the quality is going to be a lot less when pasted into an external app.

This is by design and happens when any pixel layer is sent to the clipboard. We also add 'Affinity data' to the clipboard so the object can be pasted into other Affinity apps without any loss of quality, but other apps cannot understand this so have to fall back to the PNG, TIFF or PDF data on the clipboard.

 

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1 hour ago, stokerg said:

This is by design and happens when any pixel layer is sent to the clipboard. We also add 'Affinity data' to the clipboard so the object can be pasted into other Affinity apps without any loss of quality, but other apps cannot understand this so have to fall back to the PNG, TIFF or PDF data on the clipboard.

Thanks.

I think part of the confusion may be that a Placed image is not a pixel layer, but an (Image) layer. Some of us may be expecting that since it's an (Image) layer not a (Pixel) layer that the clipboard data would include a full-resolution JPG or TIFF or PNG copy (as appropriate).

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
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6 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I think part of the confusion may be that a Placed image is not a pixel layer, but an (Image) layer.

I agree with you on that point.  It's always annoyed me with the pixel and image layer thing.  I've lost count the amount of times i've made a selection and then hit delete and the whole image is deleted and not the selection, all because i forgot to rasterize the layer to make it a pixel layer.  I'm sure there is a good reason for this, but i've no idea what that reason is at moment.  I'll try and find out on Monday when i'm back in the office and update here :) 

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On 9/19/2019 at 11:13 AM, markw said:

Copied a 1100x825px image from Finder and pasted it into Designer. All well and good.
Copied the resulting new image layer from Designer and pasted into Pixelmator. Image is now 264x198px

1100 / 264 = 4.1666666666666666666666666666667

300 (DPI) / 72 (DPI) = 4.1666666666666666666666666666667

Your results would appear to be DPI related rather than what the OP is experiencing  

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2 hours ago, carl123 said:

4.1666666666666666666666666666667

You missed a 6. :D

Why not just say that dividing the numerator and denominator of 1100/264 by 11 turns it into 100/24, and likewise dividing the numerator and denominator of the fraction 300/72 by 3 turns it into 100/24? ;)

 

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
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2 hours ago, Alfred said:

Why not just say that dividing the numerator and denominator of 1100/264 by 11 turns it into 100/24, and likewise dividing the numerator and denominator of the fraction 300/72 by 3 turns it into 100/24? ;)

Why not just say both fractions can be reduced to 25/6?

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3 hours ago, R C-R said:

Why not just say both fractions can be reduced to 25/6?

No reason except that it’s immediately obvious that the numerators 1100 and 300 are both divisible by 100, and that the denominators 264 and 72 are divisible by 11 and 3 respectively, whereas reducing the 100 to 25 requires you to observe not only that the denominators are divisible by 4, but that they remain divisible by 4 when you do the other divisions.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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So math aside, coming at this from any other vector based illustration software I need to say this doesn't make sense to me at all:

Being an object oriented, vector-based app, it feels completely against the norm for Affinity to let the clipboard receive a rasterized-to-the-measurements-of-its-own-internal-workspace version of anything — the entire point of vector based illustration being that no rendering takes place (should take place) until actual printing/exporting to a resolution-dependent entity is performed. 

So just as a an elaborate bezier curve doesn't get jagged when copying it out of the app, nor should a pic get downsampled in the process.
(Or, conversely, if a pasted pic will not be handed over as-is, why are not also vector objects rasterized and downsampled to that internal resolution?)

Below is a graphic with some vector objects + one pasted pic, first seen in Affinity Designer, then cut-and-pasted to the MacOs Preview app.

To me, it honestly makes no sense why the image is re-rasterized when nothing else is — and unfortunately, it's inconsistencies and quirks like this, where Affinity sort of seems to invent their own workflow and logic in a world where certain agreements have already been made, that stops me from dumping Adobe and switching for real. I may hate Illustrator and inDesign for a number of reasons, but none of them is unpredictability, and when things needs to get made on a deadline, clunkiness is a small price to pay for not having to struggle with unexpected results...

/L.A.

 

image.thumb.png.e1ecd64fc41d234633c6b31c6bcfc978.png

image.thumb.png.cfe3d9870f5744447bb61ae4ecc4e89a.png

 


 

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In fact, and for comparison — doing the exact same thing in Illustrator gives me this: (sorry for another set of large screenshots below)

In short, Illustrator copies the image to the clipboard like any other object, leaving for the destination app to render it to any resolution at output time.
If Affinity's take is by design, I would love (well — need!) a setting to opt out of that behavior...

image.png

image.png

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What application did you paste into for that last screenshot, @expressoaddict?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
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Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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8 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

What application did you paste into for that last screenshot, @expressoaddict?

Same as when pasting from Affinity Designer — namely MacOs Preview.

So: Copying from Illustrator to Preview gives another result (resolution independent) than if copying from Affinity Designer to Preview (resampled).

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3 hours ago, expressoaddict said:

Being an object oriented, vector-based app, it feels completely against the norm for Affinity to let the clipboard receive a rasterized-to-the-measurements-of-its-own-internal-workspace version of anything — the entire point of vector based illustration being that no rendering takes place (should take place) until actual printing/exporting to a resolution-dependent entity is performed. 

Quite a few apps cannot render vector based objects, so to ensure that they can use the contents of the clipboard, it is not at all unusual for apps like Affinity to place more than one version of copied content onto the clipboard.

BTW, the MacOS Preview app can only open .ai files if they include an embedded PDF version of the file's content.

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9 hours ago, R C-R said:

Quite a few apps cannot render vector based objects, so to ensure that they can use the contents of the clipboard, it is not at all unusual for apps like Affinity to place more than one version of copied content onto the clipboard.

 BTW, the MacOS Preview app can only open .ai files if they include an embedded PDF version of the file's content.

Sure — but is that relevant to my problem, really?

MacOS Preview does indeed render vectorized objects fine, regardless of whether it is a PDF or an SVG or something else under-the-hood. Any such vector/object based file format is a collection of objects, in which a full-resolution pic could well be embedded. No need to resize it just because we put it on the clipboard.

So on one hand, you're right: It's not uncommon to enclose a bitmap (preview) of a vector illustration, together with the unaltered resolution-independent vector version, be it in a saved/exported file (such as PDF) or when copying to the clipboard.
But my point is not that. My point is that when copying an illustration with an image in it, while any enclosed bitmap fallback/preview part will obviously by definition have a resolution and thus have all contents jagged if zoomed, the object/vector part should just be preserved as is — including images which should just be enclosed at its own original full resolution. Again, the reason for downscaling images in this case is none, as proven by other illustration packages.

 

One more example — perhaps the most obvious one as to why Affinity's current model is far from ideal:

Below, two screenshots.
First, I create the same kind of graphic in both Affinity and Illustrator, with some native objects plus my one random pasted pic from google.
Then, I copy the Affinity artwork into Illustrator, and the Illustrator artwork into Affinity.
Note how Illustrator encloses all data and lets me continue to work with the unaltered material in the destination app, whereas Affinity downsamples the data and makes it useless.
I don't think it's inappropriate to say Illustrator gets this right and Affinity gets it wrong.

 

image.thumb.png.18223128177b4c115a472bdda49622b6.pngimage.thumb.png.23a8369d8b4c564067039654743f55f6.png

 

 

 

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43 minutes ago, expressoaddict said:

MacOS Preview does indeed render vectorized objects fine, regardless of whether it is a PDF or an SVG or something else under-the-hood.

Preview.app will not open SVG files, much less render their contents correctly. If you copy a vector object to the clipboard, you cannot paste it directly into a document open in Preview. You can use File > New from Clipboard but that converts vector objects to rasterized PDFs using the PDFlib & PDF Import Library (PDI) built into the Mac OS. Preview.app can render PDF's smoothly at any zoom level, but that is because the app supports anti-alias blending, not because the rasterized PDF content itself is resolution independent vector objects. This also applies to .ai files that include embedded PDF versions of the files' content. (Again, Preview.app cannot open .ai files that do not include an embedded PDF.)

So to begin with, Preview & apps with similar capabilities can't preserve the resolution independence of imported/pasted vector objects. At best, they can rasterize vector content & perhaps apply anti-aliasing during rendering or exporting, but varies from app to app.

2 hours ago, expressoaddict said:

So on one hand, you're right: It's not uncommon to enclose a bitmap (preview) of a vector illustration, together with the unaltered resolution-independent vector version, be it in a saved/exported file (such as PDF) or when copying to the clipboard.

It is much, much more complicated than that. For example, with the Affinity Preferences > General > Copy items as SVG option enabled, copying two layers, one a vector shape & the other a pixel layer, from an Affinity document to the clipboard on a Mac results in over a dozen data types, each with a different identifier, being placed on the clipboard. Some are empty (zero bytes), some with different identifiers have identical data, & some are unique. Singly or in combinations the OS uses this data to decide what can be pasted from the clipboard into any app. What is pasted in turn depends on what kind of data the app declares it can use & any user configurable options the app supports for that.

There may or may not be one or more items identified as bitmaps, & if there are any they may or may not include metadata for height or width or anything else an app might use to render the bitmap in one way or another.

IOW, this is not just about some simple "fallback/preview part." There are several reasons why considering it as such will not tell you the whole story & lead to the wrong conclusions about how it all should work.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 1 year later...

1572849000_500ML(R)a.thumb.jpg.abf0537bd33e4a5866e91e7458c121a5.jpg@expressoaddict Did anyone help you with your problem? Because I might just have the same issue.

 

I'm three years late, but I've just discovered that I have issues with the resolution of files I've made when I export as .jpg and .png and email it.

I don't know most of what was discovered up (I'm not as smart lol) and I've been experiencing Affinity by myself, so it's been a learning journey for me. But I'd really like to know how to preserve the resolution of my work when I create it. Maybe it's a wrong setting I put in or something, or maybe the app it is opened with is unable to comprehend it but whenever I design something and email it to say, post it as a profile picture on Instagram or open it in corel draw, it never keeps the resolution the same or the font is larger or smaller than it should be.

Any suggestions?

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