Toonman

Thanks again Lagarto. I just noticed Affinity can actually export LUTs. I'll look up more information on this to see if I can generate one that I can use in my NLE to get the colors to display properly. Thanks again!

Thanks a lot for all the help guys! Everything explained here is really clear. Lagarto, really appreciate everything you took the time to explain (this post should be a sticky! I'm sure a lot of people running into the same issues would find this useful). So, in short, I should be using my monitor's ICC profile at the OS level (which I already do), I should use a hardware calibration device (gonna look into one right now), and I should use sRGB in my Affinity docs (which I already do). I just discovered XnView does support ICC profiles, except they're not turned on by default. For those who would like to use them, you just need to go to Tools/Settings.../General/ICC. I set the System ICC profile to use my Dell ICC profile, the RGB profile to sRGB, and the CMYK profile to System profile, and now XnView displays my image properly. So I guess my exported image (which did have the embedded ICC profile option enabled) was always fine, but I got fooled by XnView not remapping the colors properly. My primary applications for the work I do are video and web applications. I am not sure if web browsers interpret ICC profiles (my search returned ambiguous information on this), but video editors certainly do not. So, I'm thinking I have probably two options here to get the correct colors from exported images into my video editor (or a web browser)... 1. Somehow "bake" the ICC profile onto the colors of my image prior to exporting. I guess I could perform a Convert Format/ICC Profile operation on my document, set the new profile to my Dell profile, and then export the image WITHOUT embedding the ICC profile in it. That should leave me with an image where the actual colors reflect what I see in my display, right? (I am aware that it will look different on other displays... which does complicate things a bit). 2. Apply a LUT on the image inside my video editor that does the same job the ICC profile does. I do not know if there will be a LUT that actually works like the ICC profile. I guess I'll have to experiment. If you have any ideas around how to deal with this, I'll be quite interested to hear them! I'm guessing the same workflow would apply to images generated for web content. Thanks again!

Thanks a lot to everyone who have posted here with suggestions. I've gone through each post and taken a look at a few things. I've found some interesting stuff along the way. First, thanks a lot Psenda for the color management article. That helped quite a bit. It turns out I might be already using the suggested workflow. I'm working on a Dell U2711. I'm using Dell's ICC profile for display (on Windows 10). Affinitiy is set to use sRGB for its default color profile, and my document is using sRGB too. I've tried exporting the image to PNG, JPG, and EXR using the defaul settings, all delivering the same result. An interesting thing I ran into was that changing my display ICC profile to sRGB instead of Dell's profile, changed the colors displayed in Affinity to the ones shown in the exported image (which made my image in Affinity appear incredibly bright and saturated). So, both images matched, although the colors are not the ones I intended. Switching back the ICC profile to Dell's (restarting the computer after each change) had the document display again using the "original" colors, and the export ignore them and display the saturated bright red. I'm attaching a small sample of both the Affinity document and the exported PNG in case it helps determine what the issue is. Is it my ICC display profile? Should I set it to sRGB and then color correct my document to have the colors be what I had before? Thanks a lot! ColorProblem.afphoto

Seems like this is a problem for quite a few users, judging by the search results I got on the topic. I'm having a problem where the colors of any image I export don't match the colors I see in my document. I've tried exporting to different formats, and they all give me the same result. Here's a screen capture of what I mean (image viewer on the left, Affinity Photo on the right)... So, as you can see, there is a drastic difference. I've already checked my color space and ICC profile settings (RGB and sRGB respectively) and also made sure that my ICC color profile in Windows matches what Affinity Photo is using. It hasn't made any difference at all. Curiously, when I open the exported image in Photo, it appears correctly. Please forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, since color management is something I'm still getting a grasp on. Any help is sincerely appreciated. Thanks in advance!