visual.af
CRT for Affinity
Turns any layer into a tube screen: curvature, RGB phosphors, scanlines and bloom.
Ink Bleed for Affinity
Your images, printed in lines of ink: strokes swell in the shadows, break into dashes in the highlights, wobble like a hand-drawn line and bleed into the paper fiber. With 2 or 3 inks, overprint with misregistration.
Free, with your Visual.af account.Your Visual.af account takes two clicks with Google.
Already have the Visual.af category? Download the .afscript and import it from that category’s ≡ menu.
BeforeAfter
5 presets to start from
Pick one in the dialog and tweak from there. Every control can still be adjusted.
Default
A near-black ink in horizontal lines, with moderate bleed and paper texture.
Typewriter
Carbon-blue ink in thin, heavily broken lines with clean highlights, like a typewritten copy.
Overprint
Blue and red crossed at right angles, slightly off-register: a two-plate print.
Engraving
Fine diagonal lines with almost no breaks, with the feel of an engraving or a banknote.
Fluo
Three inks, fluorescent pink, blue and yellow, each at its own angle: a full-color riso print.
Every control, explained
The same names you see in the script’s dialog.
- Line spacing px
- The distance between lines, in document pixels. Larger means fewer, thicker lines.
- Thickness
- How much the stroke swells in dark areas. When high, neighboring lines merge into solid ink.
- Contrast
- Pushes highlights and shadows further apart before the lines are drawn.
- Clean highlights
- Keeps the paper clean in light areas, without thin stray lines across the background.
- Dashes
- How much lines break into dashes in light areas. At zero, lines are continuous.
- Wobble
- How much each line waves, like a hand-drawn stroke.
- Bleed
- How far the ink spreads into the paper: it thickens the stroke and gives it a ragged edge.
- Ink texture
- Uneven ink inside the stroke, drier where the line is thin.
- Ink count
- How many inks are printed, from 1 to 3. The image is split between them by color.
- Ink 1, 2 and 3
- The color of each ink. Inks 2 and 3 turn on with the ink count.
- Angle 1, 2 and 3
- The angle of each ink’s lines, in degrees: 0° is horizontal and 90° is vertical.
- Density 1, 2 and 3
- How much ink each plate carries.
- Misregistration px
- How far each plate shifts from the others, like a print that’s out of register. Only with 2 or 3 inks.
- Paper color
- The paper color. With “no color”, only the ink remains, on a transparent background.
- Paper texture
- The fiber and specks of the paper.
Tips
- Line spacingOn large photos, raise the line spacing so the lines still show when the image is scaled down or posted online.
- Just the inkSet the paper to “no color” and the lines end up on transparency, ready to place over any background or texture of your own.
- CrosshatchingWith two inks at 0° and 90°, the overprint forms a grid; at 45° and 135°, a softer diamond pattern.
Install
Ready in a minute
Scripts are imported once into Affinity’s library and stay there for good, one click away.
Download the script
Pick the dialog language, sign in with your account and download the .afscripts file.
Import it into Affinity
Open Window › Scripting › Scripts Library. In the panel’s ▾ menu, choose Import Scripts… and select the file.
Select a layer and run it
Click the script inside the Visual.af category. The first time, Affinity asks you to confirm that you trust it.
Adding a second effect?
To keep it in the same category, download the .afscript and import it from the Visual.af category’s ≡ menu with Import Script…. If you import another .afscripts, Affinity creates “Visual.af 2”: drag the script into the first one and delete the second.
Requirements
Affinity 3.3 or later, on Windows or macOS. The scripts don’t use the internet or touch your files: everything happens inside Affinity.
Frequently asked questions
What is the ink bleed effect?
It’s a screen of ink lines whose thickness follows the light in the image, with edges that spread into the paper like a real print. It recalls engraving, typewriters and riso printing.
How is the image split into several inks?
Like a riso print: the script works out how much of each ink is needed to reproduce every color on the paper, and each ink is printed at its own angle. Where they cross, they multiply.
Does it work with text, vectors or groups?
Yes. The script takes the selected layer exactly as it looks, whether it’s a photo, a pixel layer, a group, text or a whole artboard.
How fast is it?
On social media sized images each change takes one to four tenths of a second, depending on the number of inks. On 24 megapixel photos, 2 to 6 seconds.
More scripts
ASCII for Affinity
Turns your images into art made of characters, in their original colors or a single ink, with a transparent background.
Dithering for Affinity
Dithers your images with Bayer matrices or random noise, in the original colors or your own palette.