Blurry RAW image in Affinity Photo

[Anila]

Hello everyone,

I have always experienced a blurry issue in Affinity with all my RAW Files. When I preview the file, it isn't blurry at all, but when I open it in Affinity it looks like it's not on focus, not sharp, all blurry.

The issue now is getting quite annoying because I work with portraits so I would like to keep my workflow all in Affinity Photo.

I use also Capture One Pro and there my RAW Fuji files are perfect.

Sometimes to avoid the issue I create a psd file in Capture One Pro to open then in Affinity but I would like to not do that.

Is anything I am missing here?

Can anyone help me how to fix this?

I checked all the performance preferences and everything but can't find anything about this.

Please HELP!

Thank you!

Anila

[James Ritson]

Hi @Anila, are you sure they're actually blurry, or it is more likely that you're just seeing it without any sharpening applied? Affinity Photo does minimal enhancement when developing RAW files. You can either add sharpening during the development stage (Details panel>Detail Refinement) or once you've developed your RAW image and moved to the Photo Persona (Layer>New Live Filter Layer>Unsharp Mask).

I understand a concern might be that you're losing detail—don't worry as this isn't the case, the image would look soft in most RAW development applications if you removed the sharpening.

However, if your images are actually really soft (e.g. sharpening doesn't solve the issue) it would be very useful if you could provide a sample RAW file to test with. A private Dropbox link can be provided if you don't want the file to be seen publicly. Hope that helps!

[Anila]

I shoot both in Jpeg and RAW with Fuji X-T3 and my Jpegs are always perfect. My raw of course since are like virgin files sure need to be edited. But when I open them in Capture One Pro they look amazing. They don't look the same in Affinity.

I have always had this issue and didn't bother me much until now because now I work with portraits and it's not like landscapes. 

I try the Unsharp, try the high pass, try the clarity but the image is never perfect as it is out of Capture One. I don't know.

I can send you both a RAW and a Jpeg File as out from camera if you want to check. I would like to solve this.

Thank you so much for your support

[v_kyr]

25 minutes ago, Anila said:

I use also Capture One Pro and there my RAW Fuji files are perfect.

Pretty much all RAW processing and converting software do apply some default settings when opening certain camera models RAW files, so does Capture One ...

Quote

...As a part of the default settings applied to image variants, Capture One adds sharpening according to the camera model used. This step is intended to counteract the inherent softness of digital capture, including anti-aliasing, diffraction, and the subsequent interpolation or demosaicing process in Capture One....

• Sharpening

Affinity Photo is one of the few exceptions from this and doesn't apply a default sharpening here, thus things look initially sometimes very dull in contrast to what other software shows up.

[Anila]

1 minute ago, v_kyr said:

Pretty much all RAW processing and converting software do apply some default settings when opening certain camera models RAW files, so does Capture One ...

• Sharpening

Affinity Photo is one of the few exceptions from this and doesn't apply a default sharpening here.

I just see blurry though. I mean when I have to use Healing Brush tool I can't see the file really on focus and work on it properly. That's the problem

[v_kyr]

Hard to tell without seeing any comparative images to urge from. If you think there is a real problem with that, you maybe should send @James Ritson some image for inspection via Dropbox etc.

[IanSG]

18 hours ago, Anila said:

When I preview the file, it isn't blurry at all

The preview is using an embedded jpeg rather than the RAW file itself.

17 hours ago, Anila said:

I try the Unsharp, try the high pass, try the clarity but the image is never perfect as it is out of Capture One. 

Are you viewing your files at 100% zoom while sharpening?  There have been a number of posts such as this one about AP's use of mipmaps and their effect on sharpening.

[Anila]

24 minutes ago, IanSG said:

The preview is using an embedded jpeg rather than the RAW file itself.

Are you viewing your files at 100% zoom while sharpening?  There have been a number of posts such as this one about AP's use of mipmaps and their effect on sharpening.

Thank you! I did some tests right now. The 100% sure helps. 

I now noticed that when I have more than 1 photo Raw opened in affinity, the images takes longer to process and Affinity shows them blurry more than they are. When the photo opened is just 1, seems working smoothly and better in sharpness.

Maybe it takes too much time to process, my MacBook Pro retina isn't even bad in ram and ssd. 

Thank you all!

I love affinity and now having all together in Studio from publisher, sure helps my workflow when I need to do more than just edit.