El Sid

Last night I was attempting to perform a High Pass sharpening routine using the High Pass live filter when I encountered a problem setting the filter to the Vivid Light blend mode which gives me the result below... If the live filter is set to any other related blend mode such as Hard Light or Linear light this does not happen and the image looks normal and sharpened as expected. Furthermore if I leave the live filter blend mode as Normal and set the associated image layer to Vivid Light the image again looks as expected with the desired sharpening applied. I checked to see if this was perhaps associated with the file source (Nikon NEF) but saw the same issue with a Canon CR2 raw as well. Is this a bug?, I don't think I've done anything wrong...

Hi Dan Had a chance to look at this again over the weekend As I suspected disabling t he HDR option has no effect so I tried resetting the application as you advised. As you can see from the screenshot below this has corrected the gross darkening of the image and the histogram is pretty much identical to that seen in the other programs. It's perhaps still a bit darker than View NX2, DxO or RawTherapee but at least the image was fully editable and I could extract a usable image as shown in the second attachment. I still haven't a clue what I did to upset it but I think I'll refrain from messing about with the preferences from now on... I think it's fair to say I am a much happier bunny that I was last week... Thank you for your assistance. PS On the subject of Histograms I think they would be far easier to read if the the master RGB histogram were white or grey rather than lighter shade of blue which is rather easy to confuse with the blue channel....

Thanks Dan, I'll give it a go but I'm pretty sure I have tried it with and without Enable HDR without seeing any difference. If it doesn't work hopefully the reset will do the trick...

Hello Dan I checked the 32bit Preview as you suggested and the Display Transform is set to ICC Display Transform. I see what you mean about the unmanaged option - in that mode the image goes almost completely black! Unfortunately none of this gets anywhere near solving the underlying issue which is that the images are far too dark with the histogram huddled hard against the left end. I wasted another 3 hours last night and still can't get AP to open raw files in a usable form. Below is a screenshot of the Nikon D7000 file I'm trying to access as it appears in Affinity Develop Persona... ...and below are the same file opened in Nikon's own View NX2, in DxO's OpticsPro 11 and lastly in RawTherapee 5.3. As you can see all of them look reasonably similar with a sensible and realistic histogram. I find it difficult to believe that Affinity is unable to reproduce the image the same way - particularly as I have watched the video tutorial on raw development in which it histogram of the newly opened, unadjusted, file was not bunched up at one end of the scale... Finally at the bottom I have attached screenshots of the Colour & Performance dialogs from the Edit preferences section. Hopefully something in this message will hold a clue as to why I can't get anything usable out of Affinity...

...at opening RAW files? Other 3rd party converters I've used/trialled (including free ones) have absolutely no problem opening various types of RAW files yielding an image which is an accurate representation of the image as seen and recorded by the camera. Why is Affinity not capable of doing the same? Yesterday evening I wasted 3 hours trying to get Affinity to properly open a D7000 NEF file so that it looked like a usable image rather than a lousy, almost entirely black, mess. Finally I had to give up and retire to bed defeated, frustrated and FURIOUS (which I still am). It does not appear to matter what flavour of RAW file is involved (Panasonic, Nikon or Canon), the file once open is always far too dark with the histogram bunched up well to the left and tight up against the left end of the histogram window and bearing no resemblance that shown on the camera screen or in other software (where available). Attempts to correct the image are usually unsuccessful or at best result in a poor quality image that falls far short of even an in-camera JPEG which rather defeats the purpose of using RAW... I always seem to get a message advising that Affinity has converted the image to the working profile (sRGB) which is odd as my cameras are all set to sRGB and I don't get any issues with other software. The "Develop Assistant" when it does anything just makes the images even darker... I purchased Affinity Photo with the expectation of it being my one-stop resource for all RAW conversions but frankly it now appears that I might as well have chucked my money down the drain. Is it possible to get this software to properly read and render RAW files accurately or should I cut my losses and look elsewhere?...