Xara Requests, next try

[Fred vanderZee]

As a former coder I can imagine that that is the case but come on: it is 2023 now. 16 bit colours is a necessity nowadays.

Currently I am working on a huge (i.e. highly detailed) image so I am not sure Affinity is up to the task. A rough estimate for what I am working on has 2.000.000 objects. When this is finished I will have a go at Affinity on a smaller image. Hopefully I can do an export of an example to psd or something. My current experience is that it doesn't work very well.

[handrawn]

I sympathise Fred

I presume by 16 bit colour you mean 16bits per RGB channel, ie 48bits [64 bits with alpha] total per pixel ?

For high quality art that is a must, agreed

affinity is ok, in my experience, up to the limit of PSD: 30,000 pixels [technically 100 megapix, 120MB file size I understand]; unfortunately it does not cater for adobe large file size PSB, so beyond that limit I am not sure....

[Fred vanderZee]

Yeah, per channel so 48 bit. I have very big gradient areas and you see a lot of banding there.

[handrawn]

Yeah, per channel so 48 bit. I have very big gradient areas and you see a lot of banding there.

the banding issue has been in xara 'forever' - gradients are limited to 256 steps [0-255] - it really is not good enogh for work like this

[handrawn]

I think the hard limit is 2^14 - 1 (16383px)

I can see the logic in that - and a quick test showed the export dialog won't accept values typed in above that level and export correctly

I have it from memory to keep texture tile creation to max 16,000 px square in xara....

[Acorn]

Yeah, per channel so 48 bit. I have very big gradient areas and you see a lot of banding there.

@fred but mostly all.
In the Plus versions, 'simple' shapes and fills are achieved in CSS, or in SVG, when activated.

A box with a linear fill renders the fill as CSS linear gradient.
A box with an elliptical fill has an SVG data image URL.
it doesn't really matter what these are or do but they are not dimensioned; they rely on the browser to render at any scale.
No banding. Well, less as you are now trusting your browser engine to do the hard work.

It seems a shame to destroy all this fidelity by making the end result into an image.
It you must then go for WebP, also in the Plus editions.
I had a gradient 1280px wide and saving as WebP:



I found the banding to be lessened than PNG @500%.
It is also possible to apply a CSS blur to the final image.
The SVG-rendered image was by far the best.

Acorn

[handrawn]

how well do they print ?

I may be wrong but I seem to recall that Fred creates posters....

Certainly if I were to be doing anything that good [unlikely in this liketime] I would be wanting posters....

[Acorn]

Well, printing has to be down to the printer and its gamut and ink bleed.

If, however, you are asking about a source PDF, I tried a a linear page gradient and exported @9600dpi with no complaints.
I only managed to see banding at 6400% scaling of the PDF.
I have no idea what dpi a PDF can handle.

Acorn

[handrawn]

although the theoretical size of a PDF file can be very large indeed, according to spec I have you are limited to about 5m [tad under 200 inches] if you use illustrator/acrobat-distiller which is a fair number of pixels... dpi is just a packing ratio, n’est-ce pas?

[Fred vanderZee]

@Acorn, sorry for the late reply, but I was hit by a severe case of food poisoning. Couldn't eat for 5 days. Am better now but still not totally recovered.

Anyway, yes, I do draw my images as a separate image. They do have different backgrounds from the final image though, so - since part of the image is transparent - I collect all the separate layers into one grouped image and copy/paste that into the final image as vectors. Since there are 53 highly detailed images, you can imagine the sheer amount of vectors, transparences and shades.
For printing, I can separate the final mandala in parts and have them printed, then assembled together again. Size would be several meters wide, like 5 - 6 meters.
A high definition version is useful for projecting (zooming in/out) as well.
I am also looking into projecting this on mountain ranges in the Himalayas. Would be nice to have this in hi-res

Have a look at my FB page in my sig for examples of my work.