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Hello, im having issues with the cmyk color reproduction in affinity suite while adobe software (photoshop, illustrator, acrobat) shows quite accurate cmyk colors. of course its not the "real thing" as cmyk is cmyk, but you can quite easily pinpoint 100% cyan as such in adobe, and not even close in affinity. output colors (values) via pdf export are correct, but are apparently truncated down to srgb(?) for display output on my wide color gamut monitor (100% argb color space) which greatly shifts blue and green colors from the "real" cmyk colors that should and can be somewhat displayed in wide gamut, and adobe software does just that. in an affinity cmyk document 100% cyan looks like desaturated sky / baby blue, but if i create an argb instead of a cmyk document in affinity cyan begins popping, just like in acrobat, illustrator and photoshop, but these do it even within a cmyk document. at this point i dont know what exactly is going on and im trying to make sense of it. are there some hidden settings for affinity to control display color space? did something break? did i screw up the monitor setup? i have cross checked srgb vs srgb content with an old calibrated 8bit srgb monitor vs my wide gamut one and photos and web in itself looks very close in a color managed environment. i just never stumbled over this drastic difference in color rendition between affinity and adobe. thats my setup: win 10 1903 acer predator xb323U (10 bit, 100% argb) calibrated and profiled for srgb gamma response via displaycal + spyder5, but the monitor is not a professional display with hardware calibration support. Adobe CS6 newest affinity suite the files below are jpgs in argb, but maybe the upload to the board broke them - im also new to the wide gamut thing. anyway, the differences should be clearly visible in srgb, too! the screenshots show how different apps display 100% cyan. top left is affinity designer in an ECI 300% CMYK document and it looks awful - the color is just miles off. bottom left is affinity designer in an argb document with 100% cyan and it looks ok. top right is adobe illustrator in ECI 300% CMYK with 100% cyan and it looks good. bottom right is adobe acrobat showing actual print files in ECI 300% CMYK with 100% cyan (file created in affinity) and color proofing shows something close to illustrator - in wide gamut its very close visually. the 2nd screenshot shows the exact same, except for adobe acrobat having simulation profile switched from ECI 300% to srgb, and its the exact same color affinity designer shows. in an srgb document with srgb color values illustrator and designer show the same colors. i also included the first screenshot as pdf in argb in case the board dismissed the color profile or whatever. if you set the simulation profile to a wide gamut rgb (photo rgb, argb, you name it) on a wide gamut display you should see what i see. is there a way to make affinity display what adobe displays? or has someone an idea what went wrong on my end, if that is not to be expected behavior? thanks, looking forward to your input! affinity cmyk1.pdf

When we develop and edit picture starting from RAW then very often we can lose fine color details during conversion to final color space. The typical remedy is to define working color space wide enough to accommodate wide camera gamut, but still, our final color space should be smaller so finally, a conversion is unavoidable. Leaving aside a discussion about what is real color, for sometimes complex reasons we can allow small color shifts and keep details visible. Often happens that color banding or unpleasant color areas emerge in final result even when you use 16 bits per channel and perfect profiles. To overcome this problem you can try to use wide gamut profile for working space, use the color proof layer on top and then export or convert picture to final color space. Below is the explanation (rationale) for this procedure. For example, let's imagine that there is pixel with R:G:B values of 116:51:32 with ProPhoto D65 profile. For simplicity, I will use here 8-bit encoding. Normally, with wide gamut profiles, at least 16 bits per channel should be used. Now, when we convert an image with this pixel to sRGB its value becomes 164:10:27, but color will not change. Why? Because this particular color is inside sRGB and ProPhoto gamut. When I will use color proof correction layer in ProPhoto profiled picture, then for this particular pixel value will not change, and still will be 116:51:32. Similarly, there will almost be no change in expected value after conversion to sRGB color space. Because of a rounding errors small shift to 163:11:26 can be observed. This particular pixel value is almost on the boundary of sRGB color space, so small changes are possible. The situation will change dramatically if we will try to do the same with a pixel which color is out of sRGB gamut. Let's take saturated red pixel in ProPhoto color space, where the value will be 163:0:0. Now, with proof layer applied, pixel value should change to 170:72:26, but when you directly export this picture to sRGB space then the value will be 241:0:0. Exporting picture with proof layer applied results in 241:8:5. Why there is such difference? The reason is simple: proof copy is still in ProPhoto space, so relative colorimetric routine adjusts not only saturation but also other parameters. When you directly export to small, sRGB space then conversion routine is in a completely different situation. Oversimplifying, zero is zero, so closest pixel value is for conversion routine 241:0:0 - a distance between a pixel value in different colorspaces is simply too large. This behavior leads to "fine tuned" color space conversion routine. This routine gives good results with highly saturated pictures and with RAW workflow, where there are many color details outside sRGB (aRGB) space. You have to remember, that modern cameras have really wide gamuts. Very often much wider than Adobe RGB in reds and blues. What do you think?