TristanN

So after all of that hunting down the problem, I gave up and reset all affinity preferences. Hey presto, we're back in action. I don't know what happened and quite frankly I don't care to figure it out. I'm just glad it's sorted. To answer your question anyway, the document was in CMKY/8, and changing my colour profiles changed all colours evenly. I have to assume there was some rendering issue or obscure setting that I touched in a haze when I got the program. Thanks for all the help!!

I forgot the affinity preferences screenshot. Here are my colour settings:

Now that is very curious. This is what I see: So I'm getting the exported files darker than what Affinity shows when I design it. All I'm doing here is placing the pdf's down in affinity and taking a screenshot. The pdfs look exactly like this when I open the with preview. The plot thickens now because I put your image down on top of that file and the colour you are seeing is the correct one that I was seeing when editing the file. I don't quite understand because if preview was having an issue it should look fine in affinity and if I was exporting wrong then you should be seeing what I'm seeing. It appears as though my computer is just deciding to dislike these pdf's. I'm so confused. To answer your question, I'm using my MacBook display (2020 M1) and the colour profile is set to the default "Colour LCD" option. I tried flicking through a few others and opening the pdf but it didn't make a difference. It feels like there's a rendering issue on my side or something. I can't right now but this evening I can go update my computer to make sure I'm on the latest version. I see I'm on macOS 12.4 and 12.6 is out. Maybe?

Absolutely! I've taken a a bunch of screenshots ranging from setting up a new document, making the design, viewing the document setup and then the pdf export settings. I've done it with both the pdf and pdf/X-1a:2003 formats. Then I've added a screenshot me placing the pdf into the file to view the colour changes. Oh and the actual file. Help would be much appreciated! I really need to solve this colour change issue. broken version.afpub test pdfX-:1a.pdf test.pdf

If this helps, I've managed to solve the problem by saving as PDF/x-1:2003. It preserves the colour and there's no need to alter the rasterisation setting. I'd still like feedback on what is going on here though if anybody can help? It doesn't feel like this should be the correct solution.

I'm having serious trouble exporting my file. Originally I had my colour profiles set to RGB and when I changed to CMYK there was some funny business with colouring. To make sure I wasn't outside the colour gamet I reset the colours with new CMYK ones. Then I started a new document to test the colours. This is where the trouble really started. I made 3 squares on top of one another. Solid colours top and bottom and the middle had a gradient running between them. I've attached pictures so you can see. One of them worked and the others had colours messed up. I feel as though I've run through every colour setting but I'm not sure anymore. Curiously, the working document only worked when I set export to rasterise nothing. In contrast, I can force the broken versions to work by manually rasterising them. I'd prefer to not do this to keep editing and scaling capabilities. Even with the working version the exported colours are a bit muted, though I made the document in CMYK. Am I missing something with my export settings, document setup? It's not making any sense.working gradient.pdf broken gradient.pdf broken gradient 2.pdf