Using Patterns in Affinity Programs
Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are great programs for creating graphics and for doing photo editing. I generally use Affinity Designer for vector graphic work and pattern creation and Affinity Photo for the editing tasks. You can also make patterns with Affinity Photo since it has a transform panel for doing the repeat calculations.
I ran into a strange problem last night when proofing a pattern repeat I had created in Affinity Designer. The pattern had thin white lines around the seams.
Using Affinity Photo, I had opened a new A3 size document, placed my tile image into a layer, selected the layer and created a pattern layer from the selection.
When I created the pattern layer the pattern had a thin line between the corner seams ruining the repeat.
I checked all was OK with my pattern tile, that I had made sure there were no borders around the edges of the tile and all the elements were correctly placed. I hadn’t resized the source tile or anything either.
A good thing to note when using pattern layers in Affinity Photo is that if you resize a pattern tile and then rasterize it, it will create blurring around the edge of the tile which creates lines in a pattern layer around the seams, so don’t do that. You can resize the tile dynamically once you have created the pattern layer anyway.
Eventually after a lot of frustration, the only thing that solved the problem was to make sure the tile image for making the pattern layer was snapped to the top left corner of the document first before making the pattern layer.
Another way to possibly avoid this problem would be to use this paste into the document method in the video below instead of placing the source tile in the same document.
It must be some issue with having white space around the pattern tile image. A really annoying little problem that wasted quite a bit of time. I know this isn’t the most exciting post, but maybe it will be useful to someone or me if I forget in the future…
I could have tried the Gradient fill with bitmap method in Affinity Designer to proof the pattern as well.