My Affinity Photo Printing Workflow

My good friend Ray got me wise to this new photo editing software called Affinity Photo. Well, it was “new” to me. It’s been around for a while, judging from all the videos about it on YouTube.

I’d been grousing about how much it was costing me to have Adobe PhotoShop on my computer. I use it maybe once every 2 or 3 months; but I have to pay $15 every month for my subscription.

Affinity Photo (AP) isn’t a subscription product. You buy it once (currently U$50), and you own it. Well, until they put out another major version, I imagine. But, I’m OK with that. So bye bye PhotoShop!

The program is very full-featured. Anything you want to do with an image, or to an image, you can probably find a video on YT explaining how to do. Except for positioning your image on a page when you’re printing from AP. (At least, I couldn’t find one.) Ray did walk me through a workflow which worked really well for me. But I don’t actually print all that often; so I forgot how it went.

Ray-the-infinitely-patient showed me again. This time I vowed to write it down, and perhaps even make a screencast video of it. Which, of course, I didn’t. Guess what? I forgot the workflow.

So when I again needed to print an image in the middle of the page, I tried to figure it out on my own: I did NOT want to admit to Ray that I’d forgotten this TWICE! Instead I posted the question to the AP sub on Reddit. And within 30 minutes, some good Samaritan had replied.

In recognition of Ray and the Redditor’s generous help, I’m going to describe the workflow here for you. (Really, it’s for me.)

Here we go: in AP create a new document, specifying the dimensions of your page. I’m using an 8.5″x11″ page, so it looks like so:

Specify the document dimensions. You can remove the Include margins checkbox.

This will show you a blank document. If the blue, vertical rectangle appears, it’s the margin. You can hide it in the View menu.

The empty document, sized to the dimensions of your paper.

Now we open the image we want to position on the page. It helps if the resolution of the image matches the resolution of the page document; but it’s not imperative.

Image to be positioned on the page document.

Select the Move Tool [V] and click on the image. This will select the image. Now copy the image into the clipboard by either pressing cmd-C or using the context menu (right-clicking on the image) and selecting Copy.

The image is selected using the Move Tool [V].

Now move over to the page document, by clicking the tab above the workspace, and paste the copied image by hitting cmd-V, and select the Move Tool again. You’ll note the image is much larger than the page document.

The image in the page document is much larger than the document.

Note the Transform tab in the right margin of the workspace. You can go in and adjust the width and height of the selected image.

The image with adjusted size.

Now we want to position the image in the middle. We can either do it manually by dragging it; and we’ll be helped by guides when we get to the middle, both vertically and horizontally. Or we can use the positioning buttons at the top right of the window.

Manually dragging the image to the center of the page document. Note the vertical and horizontal guides indicating the center.

And here’s the alignment dialog method (in the upper right corner):

The alignment dialog.

And now you can print the page document, and your image will appear in the proper position. I’ll be working on a video version of this tutorial; but no promises as to when (or if) that will happen.

Stay safe, wear a mask, practice social distancing. The end is nigh.

4 thoughts on “My Affinity Photo Printing Workflow

Leave a Reply to Peter Turney Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.