James Ritson

Hi Geddy, we do ship what is effectively a ProPhoto RGB profile with the Affinity apps but it’s called ROMM RGB. You can safely use that in the knowledge that it’s ProPhoto. The ProPhoto profile on your HP machine will likely have been installed with other software—I gather you might not have installed that same software on your Surface? Hope that helps!

The Panorama merge operation should get its document colour profile from what is mandated in the image's metadata—this is often sRGB or Adobe RGB. I've just tested with my default RGB Colour Profile option set to ROMM RGB, but the panorama stitch correctly uses sRGB instead since the images are in that colour space. This is on Mac—perhaps it's not working as intended on Windows 1.7.2?

Hi John, thanks for your reply, we can hopefully do some more investigation tomorrow (it's bank holiday here at the moment). That behaviour you describe is expected for 1.7.2, it appears the non-linear view transform is only applied once the document window is restored (un-minimised), we've seen that happen on all the Windows machines here. The concern is that for yourself and others, the view transform wasn't being applied at all until you did a Ctrl-runup and cleared the user defaults. Thank you again for getting back to us about this issue—can I just confirm that everything is working for you now after clearing the defaults? Thank you for the comment about the videos too

Hi Steve, no, you shouldn't need to touch that option, Affinity Photo will automatically use any valid GPU devices. The easiest way to confirm this would be to add something like a Live Motion Blur layer to an image and click-drag on the canvas to make the radius value extreme. As you add/remove GPU devices this should speed up or slow down significantly. I believe Photo supports hot-plugging devices so you can add/remove your Blackmagic eGPU whilst in-app for a more direct comparison. Hope that helps!

Hi John, thanks for trying all that, it's helping to narrow it down. Looks like it may be something the developers need to know about as the same issue is occurring for another customer, albeit when developing RAW files. There are a couple of things to try, and then a final solution if those don't work. My apologies for all this, I believe there was a change in 1.7.2 to fix the 32-bit document view for people who had HDR enabled within Windows, and it may/may not be behind the issue we're seeing here. For the customer I mentioned, minimising and then bringing the app back up seems to apply the non-linear view transform as intended, maybe that would be something to try? Just open up your HDR merge or a RAW file, minimise to desktop, then click on the taskbar icon to bring the window back up and see if that corrects it. Because there are only two reports of this so far (that we know about), it's worth seeing if there's any correlation with PC specifications—I can't find yours listed anywhere, but the other customer's are: Windows 10 Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8400 CPU @2.80GHz 2.81 GHz RAM: 16GB Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Do you have anything similar to the above setup? Another thing to try would be a factory reset of the app. If you double-click the app icon (or launch it through the start menu) then immediately hold down Ctrl after doing so, a dialog box should pop up. It will have three options checked by default—leave these checked and click Clear. This will wipe user defaults and window settings—see if this helps your issue. Finally, failing that, I believe a patch will be on its way soon to fix some smaller issues. To get things working for now, it may be worth downgrading—did you purchase through the Affinity store and activate with a serial number? If so, you can download older versions from this page: https://store.serif.com/en-gb/update/windows/photo/1/ — I would normally recommend 1.7.1 but in your first post you mentioned downgrading already. Does that mean you also get the issue with 1.7.1? If so, I would recommend trying 1.7.0 since that definitely doesn't have the HDR document view fix. Again, apologies for the issue. I've been unable to reproduce it on my work and home PCs, so at the moment am unsure of what factors into causing it. Looking forward to your reply!

Hi John, thank you for replying and looking at your settings. One more thing to investigate then—if you go to the top menu and choose Document>Convert Format / ICC Profile, then from the Colour Format dropdown change from RGB/32 to RGB/16 and click Convert, I suspect your image will become brighter and look the same as when you export it. Please would you be able to try this and confirm for me? Just going on a hunch, have you tried loading and editing any RAW files directly in Affinity Photo? If so, could you try opening one, then clicking Develop and seeing if you get the same noticeable tonal shift (i.e. the image looks dark when you're editing the RAW but when you click Develop it then becomes much brighter). To explain the above: the Develop Persona also operates in 32-bit linear when developing RAW files—the same format your HDR merged document uses—so I'm trying to ascertain whether the issue is with the non-linear view transform being applied. The non-linear transform is required to make your image consistent with how it will look when exported. If it's somehow not being applied to the document view (or canvas as we also call it), that would explain the huge discrepancy you're seeing. Thanks again and hope to hear back from you.

Hi, please could I advise not to touch the options on the 32-bit Preview Panel—the Display Transform should be set to ICC Display Transform and left on that option. Unmanaged is for edge cases when you need to see the scene-referred (linear) representation of the image, it doesn't apply to most photography/image editing workflows. By default (when developing to 16-bit), if you try and make edits with an Unmanaged view and then click Develop, the developed image will appear significantly brighter. This is because you are moving from Unmanaged (linear) to a non-linear view transform, and this behaviour is by design. When editing 8-bit and 16-bit documents, the non-linear view transform is accurate and will reflect how your image will look when exported. It's possible to type several paragraphs about all of this, but that wouldn't really have much relevance. In order to troubleshoot this issue, please could you ensure Display Transform is set to ICC Display Transform, perform some edits to your image, develop it, then see if the developed result looks the same? What we need to do is eliminate the 32-bit Preview Panel settings as a factor as they're only complicating the issue. As an aside, this is likely because the navigator preview still has the non-linear view transform applied—in this instance, that's actually correct and is an accurate representation of how your image will look in the main Photo Persona and when exported. Just a side note, you shouldn't change preview exposure and gamma with the expectation of them having an effect on the final image–they're non-destructive and applied at the view stage, they have no bearing on the numbers (pixel values) within the document. To be blunt, for the majority of photographic image editing cases, the 32-bit Preview panel should just be left alone it does have a valid use if you want to enable HDR and see the extended brightness values of your document/image, but until HDR adoption becomes more widespread and supported within image viewers, web browsers etc its usefulness is limited since you would still have to tone map an SDR version of your image for export.

Hi, this is a little suspect since you should be seeing a difference. ICC Display Transform will be performing a non-linear gamma transform using the display profile (and thus is closest to how you will see your image when exported to an 8-bit or 16-bit image format with a non-linear profile). Unmanaged will be viewing in linear light since there is no management from the document profile to display profile. It sounds like you might have HDR enabled in Windows and possibly Affinity Photo—a couple of things to check if you'd be happy to? On your 32-bit Preview Panel within Affinity Photo, is "Enable HDR" checked? Within Windows Display Settings, is "Play HDR games and apps" enabled? (https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4040263/windows-10-hdr-advanced-color-settings) If possible, could you attach screen grabs of your 32-bit preview panel and the Windows display settings? Specifically, if you have HDR enabled, there's a text option called "Windows HD colour settings" which will open a dialog that gives you a slider to balance HDR/SDR content. If you could get a screen grab of that, it would be much appreciated. If the above doesn't apply to you at all (e.g. you don't have an HDR capable display), would it be possible to just get a screen grab of your 32-bit Preview Panel? I did also notice in Dan's screenshot that you appear to be using a custom sRGB document profile? It has "black scaled" appended to its name. Can I check if this was a conscious choice to use it? I'm not sure about XnView's colour management capabilities, so if this profile has some kind of deviation from a typical sRGB profile it may also be a factor in why your image looks different when opened in that software. Apologies for the wall of text, hope to hear back from you so we can try and narrow down this issue!

Hi Don, you'll also need to be working with a 32-bit float document—typically these would originate from 3D renders (OpenEXR, Radiance HDR), merging bracketed exposures or simply creating a 32-bit document from one raw image. These tutorial videos should hopefully prove helpful: Since you're on Windows, the working terminology will be slightly different (EDR on Mac versus HDR on Windows), but all the functionality remains the same. Hopefully that will work for you—if not, please let us know! HDR on Windows is still a bit hit and miss but I've used Affinity Photo's HDR capability on several setups, and as long as you ensure Windows is compositing in HDR and you're editing a 32-bit document it should all work.

Hi, are you referring to Affinity Photo? Given your specs, I wonder if the new Metal compute hardware acceleration may be more of a detriment than an improvement. Your GeForce GPU won't be supported, but the Intel HD graphics may well register as compatible—the issue is that the older generation of Intel integrated graphics are quite weak, and the compute performance is likely slower than just using CPU. If you go to Preferences>Performance and disable Metal compute at the bottom (then restart the app) does performance improve? This should at least return it to 1.6 levels of performance with additional 1.7 optimisation in some key areas. Hope that solves your issue—if not, let us know!

Hi, this issue comes up quite frequently. The Affinity apps perform colour management from the document colour profile to the display/monitor profile—it's possible you have a defective display profile which was installed by default along with your monitor. You will likely come across the issue with any colour managed applications (including Adobe products, just google "Photoshop whites are yellow" and this will be corroborated). Ideally, you need to profile your monitor using a colorimeter/measurement device e.g. i1 Display Pro using either the software it comes with or displayCal. This will produce a proper display profile that works correctly with colour managed software. If this is not possible, you'll need to reset your display profile within Windows to the default sRGB device profile. Here's a thread post with a solution, look specifically at step 6 for how to assign the sRGB device profile to your monitor: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/91411-100-red-in-document-and-color-picker-looks-orange/&tab=comments#comment-485651 Note that while this should work, it's not an ideal solution. In order to ensure accurate colour representation you should really consider investing in a colourimeter device and creating a custom profile. The Affinity apps are colour managed, so they will be able to use this custom profile to accurately convert the colour values from the document to your monitor. The reason you're not seeing the issue in other apps such as Xara Designer is because they likely do not perform colour management. Hope the above is helpful to you. [Edit] Here is another thread with the same issue (which also links to the steps provided in the thread above):

Hey all, just a quick update, here's another video for you about using the Infer LUT functionality: Infer LUT Stay tuned for more videos soon!

Hi @Wireman, just to quickly answer this: Photo is taking parts of the wire from the left/right of the bird. It will analyse and try and replace the content in the most logical way, which means it will often "complete" lines or similar subjects. It does this with or without the non-destructive approach. I'm not on a Mac at the moment so I can't test, but I've never had this experience. I'll have a look when I'm in the office tomorrow. I would have suggested some kind of keyboard setting (perhaps accessibility?) but you say it doesn't happen in other apps, so probably not...

Hi, all the videos are on YouTube—they're linked in the first post... alternatively, you can get to the channel here: http://youtube.com/c/AffinityPhotoOfficial/ Just a quick update to make you aware of a new video I've uploaded. It still needs subtitling/localisation before appearing on the Affinity website but you can watch it on YouTube in advance: Changing DPI It was created to address some of the confusion around using the Document Resize feature, so hopefully it will clear things up a bit! As usual, the first post has been updated.

Hello all, apologies as the online help had been updated since Thursday but I didn't get around to updating this thread. Affinity Publisher has now been added to https://affinity.help and there have been a couple of new features added: Search: we've implemented our own bespoke search for the online help which is fast and accurate. Access it via the tab system along the top left. Favourites: you can add topics to your favourites list to easily access them during future browser sessions. Simply click the + (plus) icon next to the "Favourites" tab to add the current topic.