panelson3

I completely agree: Full color management following the ICC specifications with an easy to understand UI. I don't understand why they are not weighing in on this.

This is a critical need that needs to be addressed. Has anyone from Serif commented on the reason for a lack of solid color management capabilities in their apps and whether they are going to do anything about it?

Affinity’s apps seem so capable in many ways. It’s such a let down that printing seems to have these kinds of issues, and you have to kluge together a workaround with Acrobat. It makes me wonder if there is some kind of licensing/expense issue with integrating a CMM and providing a proper in-app ICC color managed workflow - that maybe they don’t want to pay for so that they can keep there prices down. Yeah, I just downsized my Creative Cloud subscription to just Photoshop and Lightroom, hoping Affinity Designer and Publisher would be good (and inexpensive) replacements. I just sent out a book job to the printer that I put together in Publisher. The submission was exported pdf files, so I’m hoping that the color and type look alright. If not, I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

I forgot to ask this with my last post. During your time on this forum, have you ever seen anyone from Serif/Affinity respond to a question or comment on a post?

For those of you who are printing with the Affinity products, are you happy with the results you are getting?

Absolutely agree.

Adobe ACE, and Microsoft’s ICM and Apple’s ColorSync, and any other CMM created for ICC Color Managementn is going to have to adhere to the ICC’s specifications for performing a color conversion. It would stand to reason that the results you see are very similar. That being said, if you dug deep enough you might be able to find some differences, but they may be negligible. As you know, the color gamut warning is going to indicate the out of gamut colors when comparing the source color space with the destination color space (sRGB to Canon). Because the rendering intent is a method for converting out of gamut color to in gamut color, no matter which rendering intent you choose, you will not see a change in the gamut warning. The gamut warning is simply showing you the colors that are outside the destination color space. There are plenty of sources online that provide definitions of rendering intents. I borrowed this from John Paul Caponigro... “Perceptual A perceptual rendering intent preserves the overall color appearance by changing all colors in the source space to fit the destination space. The perceptual rendering intent is favored for images that contain many out-of-gamut colors.“ It compresses the colors into the destination color space to best maintain tonal and color relationships. “Relative Colorimetric A relative calorimetric rendering intent maps the white of the source space to the white of the output. It reproduces in-gamut colors exactly and clips out-of-gamut colors to the nearest reproducible color. The relative calorimetric rendering intent is a good choice for images where more of the colors are in-gamut than out-of-gamut. Absolute Colorimetric An absolute colorimetric rendering intent differs from relative colorimetric because it doesn’t map the source white to the destination white. It reproduces hues absolutely. If the source is a clean white reproduced on yellow paper the result will be a yellow white. If the source is a cool white reproduced on a warmer paper, cyan ink will be used to simulate the cool white of the source. Th absolute colorimetric rendering intent is intended for cross-rendering simulations of output condition with another.” This is best used for proofing. “Saturation A Saturation rendering intent converts saturated colors in the source space to saturated colors in the destination space. It favors reproducing vibrant colors and will do so at the expense of reproducing hue or luminosity accurately. The saturation rendering intent is useful for reproducing graphics with high color impact. Here’s the bottom line. To make the highest quality prints possible, choose either relative colorimetric or perceptual. As results vary from image to image, softproof an image to choose which rendering intent is best for it, before you print it.”

@Lagarto, do you know what color conversion engine (CMM) the Affinity apps use to convert color? Do you think that they rely on the color engine provided by the operating system? Also, in the soft proof adjustment layer, why is Absolute Colorimetric the default? I’m assuming this is so you can see the paper white, but that doesn’t help give an accurate color rendering if your output is going to be converted using Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric.

This is the way that I understand it as well.

Hello @thomaso, Great question! If you are opening an untagged RGB file, you don’t know what RGB color space it’s in because no RGB profile was embedded with it, but you know that it’s colors are being represented by the RGB color model. One of the points of Assigning is to try to determine what color gamut your RGB (or CMYK, if the file is in the CMYK color mode) file is in or which color gamut is going to give you the most pleasing results. That’s why you only see RGB profiles for files using the RGB color model, CMYK profiles for files using the CMYK color model, etc. I hope that makes sense. So, again, think of Assigning as a way to determine the color space of an untagged file that you have just opened. Once you have figured that out or found a profile that you prefer, you can then Convert to preferred color space. Let’s say it’s an RGB file, but no RGB color profile was embedded with the file. You open it and have no idea what RGB color space your file is in. So you Assign sRGB. The color shifts to something you think is accurate, ie: you like what you see, and assume that the file probably originated as an sRGB, but the sRGB profile was never embedded with it. You are happy with the color, so you now Convert, shifting the color data in the file to sRGB. The RGB file is now in the sRGB color space. Now that you have done this conversion, you wonder what the file would look like if you were going to send it to a print service that only takes CMYK. This is when you soft proof. You set up a soft proof adjustment layer with the printer’s preferred CMYK color profile, and now you can get an idea of what your sRGB color will look like when the printer outputs it on his CMYK press. I hope this answers the question.

The difference between Assigning and Converting is confusing and, yet, pretty straight forward. Typically, you would Assign a profile when you open a file that does not have an embedded ICC profile, and you are unsure of what color space the image originated in. Assigning is like “trying on” a profile because it does not convert the color data in the file, but it will render to the screen the image in the Assigned color space. This gives you the opportunity to try different color profiles to see if you can either identify the unknown color of the image or find a color space that is pleasing. I usually find that the first profiles that I test are working spaces like sRGB or AdobeRGB since they are the most commonly used. If I can’t find what I like, I find a working space that looks the best, and then I Convert the image color to that color space. Converting, unlike Assigning, actually changes the data in the file, so this can be a bit dangerous if you aren’t careful. In my photography workflow, I put all of the color data that comes off of my camera (in a raw file) into the largest color working space I can, ProPhotoRGB. This way I am retaining as much of the color that the camera captured as I can. I edit the photo in ProPhotoRGB. When I am done editing and ready for output, I’ll convert the data depending on the output destination. If I am going to deliver the file to a printer service, I will convert down to the color space that they require. It is most often AdobeRGB. If it’s a book, I will convert to the CMYK color space that they require, like a generic US Web Coated (SWOP) or something like that. Often, CMYK printers will have a specific custom space that they want you to convert to, like blurb’s custom color space that is some kind of derivative of US Sheetfed. If I am sending my image to the web, I always convert to sRGB. In my case, the color workflow is always one of managing the color conversion from capture device, my camera which captures a lot of color, down to a working space so that I can work on it, to an output space. The output gamut is almost always smaller than my working space. So the color workflow is really a process of controlling how much color you are throwing away as you move through it. Once you have thrown the color away (and save the file) you can’t get it back. If you take a file that is in a large color gamut like ProPhotoRGB and convert it down to sRGB which is a much smaller color gamut, everything that was outside sRGB is converted down to sRGB. If you then convert back to ProPhoto, you will not get the colors back that were originally in ProPhoto. You will simply have the sRGB color inside the ProPhotoRGB color gamut.

This discussion has gotten off track. My original post asked if anyone understood why Affinity does not provide a way to convert output color prior to printing. I don't want to convert my images using ColorSync on a Mac in the print driver. If Affinity is going to be competitive, they are going to have to compete on capability and not just price. Printer color conversion is extremely fundamental. How is Publisher going to compete with InDesign if it can't print accurate color or facilitate a hard proof? I'm planning on using Designer to do client proposals. If it can't print accurate color, it's close to worthless.

Epson doesn't expect sRGB.

So if the conversion can happen in the app or in the printer driver, you need to tell both the app and the driver which you prefer. If the app is performing the conversion, you have to make sure to turn it off in the driver. If the app is not performing the conversion, then you have to set up the driver to handle it. You never want to have both the driver and the app perform a conversion. It's either one or the other.

There is no such thing as an sRGB printer, and I never mentioned using sRGB for printing. So, I am confused by your post. sRGB is a common color space originally developed to present accurate color in a web browser. For color consistency and ease of use, sRGB has been adopted by many hardware manufacturers and software developers. It happens to have a rather small color gamut, so for printing there are better options with larger color gamuts. That's why AdobeRGB is commonly used as a working space for graphics being sent to a commercial printer. The process that you describe for Photoshop is exactly what I've been writing about all along. I want the same capabilities in Affinity software. Working Color Space (AdobeRGB) converted by Affinity to the Device Color Space (Epson P800 on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag), sent out to the printer driver which is set to No Color Management (so that the color that has already been converted passes through and is not converted again by the driver), and then sent to the printer. I have been doing this for years with very predictable results.