DW52

Thanks, Bruce. Any advice will be appreciated. (Take care of your rabbits )

Thanks, Old Bruce, for this explanation. I don't have too much experience with Affinity Photo yet, so I did not know that you can undock these tabs. Now I know ;-).

Hi Old Bruce, as far as I can see there is no "X" to close a tab, but you can select another tab by clicking in the head of it. BUT: The problem was that the "Objektiv" tab stayed open (as an overlay) independent from my selection. But the advice from NathanC solved it easily.

That's it! Thank you very much.

While working with the Development Persona in Photo 2 I did something (I don't know what...) that let the "Objektiv" Tab open - no idea how to close it (program restart does not help). I can change the settings "below" the "Objektiv" tab, but I cannot see them. Any idea? Thanks in advance.

No idea what had caused the problem of "dark" RAW files (in my case Canon .CR2 files), I haven't had this problem any more for quite a while (always using the latest release of Affinity Photo).

OK. I understand your explanation. But I do not understand why Photo does not use these data to display the file. They are an integral part of the photo. If not by default, it should at least be possible to apply these data within the development process.

I enabled the Tone Curve and in fact it (right side) looks very close to the Windows Photo Display tool. But what is this "Tone Curve", is it something stored inside the RAW file, so comparable with the "manufacturer-specific adjustments" that Walt Farrel talked about in his initial reply to my orginal posting?

Up to now, I only used the default settings, so no tone curve is enabled. I made the experience with all of my own RAWs (Canon EOS 70D) and for the picture in my last posting a demo picture from http://www.rawsamples.ch/index.php/en/canon, here the one from EOS 1Dx. Another amazing fact: It takes around 10 seconds on an INTEL i5-11400 with 16 GB RAM to load and display the 28 MB .CR2 file.

Thanks for your detailed reply. But I must admit that it confuses me. So you state that Canons RAW does not include the sensor's original data, but compresses them in a Canon specific way? You can see from the attached picture that Affinity shows less contrast, less luminosity etc. Is this what the sensor really "saw"? Does it really need an alogorithm to "reconstruct" the original view? Up to now, this was not my understanding of a RAW file. I had learned that for example it has to be compressed to be displayed as an JPG, not the other way round. I tried to "rebuild" an IMG file from its RAW file in Affinity Photo, and it was rather sophisticated. That's nothing for "normal" users. Why does Affinity not apply the Canon algorithm when displaying the RAWs? At least as an option? That would be more than helpful. In my eyes this would even be necessary to make Affinity Photo the right tool to process RAWs.

I had this bug before in V1.x, I thought it would have gone, but found it now again in V2.0.4: When I open a RAW file from my Canon EOS 70D, it is displayed in Affinity Photo much darker than it really is (other 3rd programs, eg Faststone Image Viewer, display it as expected). I have to increase "exposure" by around 2 steps to get it displayed correctly. What amazes me: with the increased exposure an export to JPG will have fine results.... But in the end I cannot imagine that Canon RAW files are that dark. I read that several users complained about this problem, but all the answers given did not help me further. Is there any "easy" explanation or workaround? To demonstrate the problem, I attach a screenshot with one CR2 file, displayed in Faststone Image Viewer, Windows Explorer, and Affinity Photo 2.0.4. Thanks & hello from Germany.