)
Affinity Designer offers many fantastic and useful tools for creating your masterpiece. Through them, you can create any graphics design. However, Affinity Designer does not have an obvious way to split images, shapes, and monograms, seemingly limiting your creative options.
Affinity Designer offers multiple ways to split up images. However, they all require diligent use of the copy and crop tools. Still, these methods will help you split up your images for different purposes, letting you get creative with everything you do.
For printing multiple-page documents, Affinity Designer does offer a dedicated document split tool. By reading further, you will learn how to use this tool and other ways to split up images and objects.
Splitting up Images in Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer offers a fantastic array of drawing tools and image editing features. If you can imagine it, the app will let you do it in most cases. However, there are some more relatively obscure functions that it does not have such as a dedicated image splitter.
Spitting images has numerous applications. It lets you create complex mirrored and overlayed designs without having to repeat your work. It also lets you print large multiple-page designs when working with a small printer. As such, having a way to split your images should be in every designer’s toolkit.
Fortunately, there are ways to split images in Affinity Designer. They require a series of complicated steps, but they offer a fun and easy way to personalize your designs.
General Image Spitting Steps
While these methods are slightly different, they all have the same basic structure. What makes them different is how you apply the various steps. With that said, you can usually break down their structure into the following steps:
- Place your original image on the Canvas and make it as small or large as you need it.
- Draw a rectangle using the usual shape tools on the left toolbar.
- Select the rectangle if it does not auto select. It will serve as the boundary box for the split.
- Expand the rectangle until it covers the area you want to be split from the main image
- Click “To Curves” on the toolbar to turn the rectangle into an object you can manipulate
- Copy, paste, and move the rectangle until you cover everything you want to be separated
- Duplicate the underlying image until you have the same number of copies as rectangles
- Split the image according to your needs
Splitting Objects and Layers
The above steps will split any image you have provided you follow the steps required to slice the image. These additional steps will vary based on your desired outcome. For instance, if you want to split an object so you can insert an overlay, you can use the following steps:
- Select a selection rectangle and a copy of the object you want to split up by dragging your mouse or pencil around them
- Subtract the rectangle
- Repeat using the next rectangle and copy layer until you use them all
- Rearrange and use the new image pieces as you see fit
Splitting an Image for Printing
One of the most important reasons to split an image is so you can print it out via a printer that is too short. This situation usually happens while working on large prints, but it can popup up when working with any multipage document. Luckily, Affinity Designer offers two ways to split your image for printing
Using Expert Persona Split
The Split function of the Expert Persona window divides your image into your selected number of slices and saves them as PDF files or to whatever format your printer uses. However, Split only divides your image along a single axis with little or no customization.
Using the Split Object Method Above
If you need more control over how Affinity Designer slices your image, you must use the manual object splitting method above. Just make sure your selection rectangles are as large as a printed page. You can then position as many rectangles as you need to fill up your entire image.
Once you split your image, you should rescale the canvas to the size of a printed sheet. You can then move each slice into the remaining viewable canvas area and print it. It is slow and tedious, but your prints will be exactly as you need them.
Conclusion
Splitting images in Affinity Designer can be a tedious process, but its results are phenomenal. It does have its limitations. You can overcome this by splitting the image in a third-party app such as Placeit, or working those limitations into your design
