Creating Spot Channels

[cspikes]

Hello, new user currently on the free trial for Affinity Photo and Designer. I create my designs on iPad and then transfer them to a local production shop to create risographic prints. For this process I separate my images into spot channels that match Pantone shades my printer uses for the printing process. The channels themselves are all greyscale and I can control them just like any other channel layer, but when I'm finished I'm able to "shut off" CYMK and only ship out my spot channels.

I'm not able to find a way to do this in Affinity Photo or Designer. It appears some other users have mentioned a similar need in the past, but instead of for risograph it was for screenprinting. I imagine some other print processes require their digital files to be sent this way as well.

This is a deal breaker! I'll have to go to Photoshop to do this and it's a crucial step in my design process! We may seem like a minority of users, but I'm sure many others have the same need and simply haven't spoken up before.

 

See this thread: 

 

[Wosven]

That's a feature we miss in AP and AD and that prevent using those apps with serious illustrations, when we need to be able to work on those extra channel or check them.

On various works, like illustrations for different books using the same cartoon characters, for example, we need to use and check Pantones, and the simplest way is to do this with channels. Exporting to PDF to check with Adobe Reader isn't an good workflow. It would be best to have a new personna or special channels for this.

If fill layers were able to keep Pantone values, it would be a solution, but for now they convert to CMYN when exporting (transparency problem?).

[cspikes]

Yes, you've hit the nail on the head. I'm not sure why everything exports as CMYK, but it makes it unusable for certain types of physical print workflows  I also have a hard time checking the PDFs properly - not sure if they're exporting to a proprietary pdf format or what, but they don't seem to contain the same info as "regular" PDFs would when exported from Adobe software

[fde101]

Make sure "Honor Spot Colors" is enabled in the options panel when exporting a PDF.

I do agree that spot color support is currently quite lacking in the Affinity products, but it is at least somewhat there... a start, but it needs refinement.

[Jesse Feury]

Has there been any update on this topic? I just asked a similar question, and I am hoping there is more information on this. 

[RSWellness]

Digging up an old thread to see if V2 has made an progress on this topic? 
I print with a UV printer and spot channels are required for white and varnish layers, it is a feature that is simple to operate in Photoshop and is required across a large range of industries that should be implemented. 
 

 

[RSWellness]

Still nothing…. 

[PeachyApricot]

Nothing... I dislike that my only resort is Photoshop. More and more people are getting small format UV printers and are getting Photoshop subscriptions only for the purpose of using spot channels. UV (and DTF) printing is getting very accessible and lots of people who also own laser cutters are adding UV printing to their small businesses. I'm not super excited about that because it means more competition but it also means that there is more demand for this feature. It's no longer just a few users who would want it.

I just created a post in the "feedback" section to ask if they would consider adding this to a future release but considering posts dating from 2016 were already asking for it, I'd say there is very little hope it will happen.