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"Colors" in AP not matching "colors" outside.


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Hey everyone,

I have a problem with Affinity Photo and totally broken color profile management. I'm using Razer Blade with factory calibrated screen, let's refer it as blade.icc profile. Every time I import something into AP it will brighten all shadows for no reason. In order to work with proper colors in AP I have to import file without converting it automatically into working space (that I want to have set up as blade.icc) and after that I have to manually change document icc profile to my blade.icc. If I let AP change this automatically after import, colors will stay the same.

It's even more funny when I try to export something. If I want to export the picture as I see it in AP I have two options: change document color space to sRGB and export or change the option to embed icc profile to off in export menu, otherwise I will get image that is darker then what I'm working with in AP.

All this is so weird since icc profile is color profile not a "let's F**k this guy shadow details" profile and even when I disable this custom calibration profile in Windows and use it's default sRGB same s**t is happening. At this point I have no idea if it's me or what is happening since I never had any issues like this with other programs.

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  • Staff

Hi ijustwantthiss**ttowork,

Welcome to the forums :)

I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble with your colours in Affinity, as outlined in the above link; "Affinity apps perform what is called document-to-screen colour profile conversion. This means that the colour values (or ‘numbers’ as we might refer to them) are translated from their initial document values based on the current display profile." - other creative apps don't usually use this method, hence you may not have had these issues previously.

Please follow the instructions from this link, as it outlines the settings required in Affinity & at the OS level in order to correctly have your colours displayed in documents.

Do let us know if you're still having issues after following these steps, many thanks in advance!

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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Hey there,

thank you both for the link and for the explanation, however this is just confirming that I have right settings. But I did more testing as you mentioned AP doing things with color profiles at import and figured out that if I leave my color profile in Windows at default sRGB, everything is fine. I can even change my profile to blade and everything is same nice looking. Once I restart AP with my blade profile active, trolling begin. Then if I want it to look how it should I have to choose my blade profile inside AP as a color space of the document. I find some random images to showcase this and I opened one with sRGB profile in Windows active, one with blade profile active and the third one after applying blade color space inside AP. In these images it's not even that bad but on my last project it was straight up terrible and it ended up really dark because of this.

One thing I don't understand is why is AP doing anything with my custom color calibration since that is for the display itself and it's capability of displaying proper colors.

1.jpg

2.jpg

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10 minutes ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

, however this is just confirming that I have right settings

No, because you're assigning a device profile to your document. Device and document profiles are used for different purposes.

It's fine to have your device set to use your blade profile, but your document (and AP's preference) should use a standard document profile like sRGB.

That's what the referenced color management article says, and it's what works. If you think it confirmed that what you've been doing is correct, you may want to read it again, as it said the opposite.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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Well obviously I don't want to use display calibration profile inside my working space but if you didn't noticed that is the reason why I'm here. I was using sRGB since I'm working with sRGB files but when I do and have my custom calibration set in Windows my colors (as you can see in those pictures) are different and that's the reason why I'm going batsh*t crazy over it.

Then I find out that using this custom profile inside AP will make everything look normal again. So basically thanks for confirming that something is seriously not working here.

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@ijustwantthiss**ttowork

Could you please insert screenshots of your settings.

The operating system will take care of the monitor profile once it is properly configured in Windows or OS X. You will never select it from within Affinity apps. You should be fine with default settings in Affinity. 

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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23 minutes ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

Well obviously I don't want to use display calibration profile inside my working space but if you didn't noticed that is the reason why I'm here. I was using sRGB since I'm working with sRGB files but when I do and have my custom calibration set in Windows my colors (as you can see in those pictures) are different and that's the reason why I'm going batshit crazy over it.

Then I find out that using this custom profile inside AP will make everything look normal again. So basically thanks for confirming that something is seriously not working here.

So

  • Windows properly configured?
  • sRGB colour profile = sRGB in AP?
  • Do you see the same pattern with EVERY photo you open - also test images not made by you or people in your workflow? We need to rule images out as well.

It just sounds like issues I had some years ago when I had settings messed up in either config or had saved *images* with a wrong colour profile.

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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I did a screenshot of my settings in Windows and AP itself.

Yes I see this with every picture (my camera pictures, my phone pictures, screenshots in .png, also files from the internet like those random two i found just to make a comparison, first and second picture there should look the same since I changed only my display color profile and it should not affect the app in my opinion, also every time AP used the same sRGB color space for those.)

3.jpg

Edited by ijustwantthiss**ttowork
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I don't know if I am quite understanding what you are saying but if you change your display profile from say Blade to sRGB then this will change the appearance of the image.  That is what is supposed to happen.

You posted two different photos but it is difficult to understand what you are showing.  It is a photo with text on it.  What is it supposed to show?

Is your screen a wide gamut aRGB or sRGB?

Colors_ in AP not matching _colors_ outside. - Affinity on Desktop Questions (M.jpg

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Those pictures are three screens I took from AP while using sRGB profile (1), blade profile (2) and blade profile with blade color space in AP to show that then it is back to how it's supposed to look like. You can see that middle picture is different from the other two while it shouldn't.

Like I don't know what more to say. When I use custom calibration icc profile in Windows (that is affecting only output - my screen, not a source and so every screenshot should be the same, AND it is actually) AP decide to F**k me over and for some reason it will change the colors slightly in whatever I import.

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1 hour ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

Those pictures are three screens

 

1 hour ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

middle picture is different from the other two

Sorry to say but I only see two pictures. A landscape then a cityscape.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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  • Staff

Hi @ijustwantthiss**ttowork

OK, so my suspicion is that the blade.icc profile is deficient—out of curiosity, is this the Razor Blade laptop? Can I ask where you got the blade.icc profile from, did you download it from a website or did it come preinstalled with the laptop?

 

23 hours ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

But I did more testing as you mentioned AP doing things with color profiles at import and figured out that if I leave my color profile in Windows at default sRGB, everything is fine.

So if you switch the colour profile to the sRGB device profile, everything looks fine inside Affinity Photo? No issues, and when you export to JPEG/TIFF etc with an sRGB document profile everything looks good with an external image viewer etc?

 

23 hours ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

I can even change my profile to blade and everything is same nice looking. Once I restart AP with my blade profile active, trolling begin.

This is expected, as Affinity Photo needs to restart to colour manage with the newly chosen profile if you change it on the fly.

 

23 hours ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

Then if I want it to look how it should I have to choose my blade profile inside AP as a color space of the document

Definitely don't do this! The reason it looks OK if you use blade.icc as your document profile is because you're matching the document profile with the display profile, negating colour management entirely—the document numbers are being sent to the display with no alteration. It might look OK for you, but it won't for anyone else.

 

23 hours ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

One thing I don't understand is why is AP doing anything with my custom color calibration since that is for the display itself and it's capability of displaying proper colors.

Colour managed applications are supposed to use the display profile to translate the colour values in the document as they're sent to the display. This is especially important for wide colour profiles beyond the scope of sRGB.

 

22 hours ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

Well obviously I don't want to use display calibration profile inside my working space but if you didn't noticed that is the reason why I'm here. I was using sRGB since I'm working with sRGB files but when I do and have my custom calibration set in Windows my colors (as you can see in those pictures) are different and that's the reason why I'm going batshit crazy over it.

Then I find out that using this custom profile inside AP will make everything look normal again. So basically thanks for confirming that something is seriously not working here.

The thing that seriously isn't working has to be the blade.icc profile—not sure where you got it from but it's defective as regards compatibility with colour management. We've seen this a lot with various monitors that people are using, Windows Update seems to push specific display profiles that just don't work with colour management solutions at all—in the article that was linked above you'll see I invited people to search for "whites are yellow" in relation to apps like Photoshop because it's not just Affinity Photo that is affected.

Have you got access to a colorimeter, e.g. i1Display Pro, Spyder, ColorMunki etc? If so, I would download either the manufacturer's profiling software or DisplayCal and use that to profile your own monitor—any profile created by the software will be valid and work correctly with Affinity Photo.

If you can't profile the display by yourself, the best solution is simply to use the sRGB display profile rather than this factory-calibrated blade profile—when you say factory calibrated, that instantly makes me sound very skeptical.

 

19 hours ago, ijustwantthiss**ttowork said:

Like I don't know what more to say. When I use custom calibration icc profile in Windows (that is affecting only output - my screen, not a source and so every screenshot should be the same, AND it is actually) AP decide to F**k me over and for some reason it will change the colors slightly in whatever I import.

Again, this all points to the blade profile being incompatible with colour management. Not many applications are actually colour managed—to be honest, I've lost track of whether Windows Photos/Photo Viewer/whatever it is in Windows 10 is colour managed or not. I think web browsers by and large should be colour managed by now, but there's no guarantee there. The fact that things look different in Affinity Photo is a clear sign that it's performing colour management based on your active display profile, but unfortunately if that display profile is incompatible then everything is going to look whacked.

As I just mentioned above, unless you can create your own accurate and compatible profile with a measuring device, I think your only solution here is to use the sRGB display profile. From your screen grabs, you haven't touched Affinity Photo's default document colour profiles (they're left on sRGB) which is good—just avoid using blade.icc as your document profile altogether and stick with standardised device profiles like sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto/ROMM RGB etc. If you do use a wide profile like Adobe RGB, don't forget to convert to sRGB on export if you're going to view it in other applications that aren't colour managed—the article explains how to achieve that.

Hope all the above helps!

 

[Edit]

From a bit of searching, I found someone had posted their Razer Blade 2019 profile that they had created with DisplayCal here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l07D8CtFjXYVsDpeTAyLBEkZpELNomYo/view (from this Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/razer/comments/ase96x/razer_blade_15_2019_color_profile/)

I definitely wouldn't recommend using it for professional/production work (I'd seriously advise getting a colorimeter and creating your own profile to the standards you require) but it's worth installing and switching to it just to see if it helps. It could go either way, since if that person's display is wildly different to yours it will still look terrible, but it could also produce a much better result than the blade.icc profile you're currently using..

 

Product Expert (Affinity Photo) & Product Expert Team Leader

@JamesR_Affinity for tutorial sneak peeks and more
Official Affinity Photo tutorials

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Great reply, James.

One Question: The mods and other forum members are being respectful of the OP's post. Would it be possible to encourage the poster to show some respect to other forum users by cutting the obscenities from his posts and username?

Even when asterisked they still push an aggressive tone which does nothing to help the forum.

 

Affinity Designer & Photo  :  Win 10

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@ijustwantthiss**ttowork

I forgot to mention that Windows is a terrible operating system colour management wise. Not many programs support it - not even Windows program like build in picture viewers (amateurish) - so you have to make sure that ANY program you use is using your monitor profile. You have to use (download and configure!) a colour managed image viewer as well. Discussed here:

Further as mentioned you have to use a monitor profile made by yourself with a calibrating hardware device. You cant trust a generic profile - they never worked for me.

And BTW disable night light during troubleshooting :-)

 

  • "The user interface is supposed to work for me - I am not supposed to work for the user interface."
  • Computer-, operating system- and software agnostic; I am a result oriented professional. Look for a fanboy somewhere else.
  • “When a wise man points at the moon the imbecile examines the finger.” ― Confucius
  • Not an Affinity user og forum user anymore. The software continued to disappoint and not deliver.
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  • 1 year later...

I'm also running into the very same issue.

Decided to take another look at Affinity Photo with version 1.9 and still can't get it to display photos correctly unlike any other program: Davinci Resolve Studio, Premiere, After Effects, Microsoft Office, Chrome/Firefox, Gimp, Photoshop (soft proof set to Monitor RGB), Windows Photo Viewer, various video players etc.

Everything I open inside AP - screenshots included - looks washed out with raised shadow levels and saturation - but looks "fine" if I use the standard sRGB profile for monitor instead of the calibrated one I did for my LG 27" IPS monitor with 99% sRGB.

 

Why is AP allergic to software-calibrated sRGB displays?

A hint: My screen is calibrated to 2.2 gamma as recommended for LG flat screens using a native 2.2 gamma instead of sRGB gamma. Gamut is sRGB still. If I calibrate my screen for sRGB gamma inside Displaycal instead, every single program mentioned earlier - the whole desktop basically - looks as washed out as Affinity Photo.

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The only "solution" I found is to set the display profile to sRGB before I start AP and set to the calibrated profile after so I get correct colors.
Tried Matrix+Lut or Matrix+Curves based profiles using Displaycal/Argyll set to 2.2 gamma (native gamma of my screen) but that didn't help either.

The only way to make AP work correctly seems to have a screen supporting proper hardware calibration.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 2/5/2021 at 11:56 PM, Dennis Schmitz said:

The only "solution" I found is to set the display profile to sRGB before I start AP and set to the calibrated profile after so I get correct colors.

To add one more example of the issue, here's what it looks like on my screen. The file being shown is the first Google image search result for "black and white gradient", there's nothing special about it and any other image from that search will demonstrate the issue as well. To the left is Affinity Photo 1.9.1, to the right is the Windows Photos app (it doesn't matter that it's the Photos app — every other image viewer installed on my system other than Affinity Photo will display the image like this). You should be able to see that there is a difference in color(!) tint for the grayscale(!) gradient across apps. Affinity Photo's Color settings are unchanged from their defaults.

 

image.thumb.png.db3deadd2109b8e59875e39b875dcf11.png

As @Dennis Schmitz has already said, the only way to get Affinity Photo to match the other apps seems to be to set the color management profile used by Windows to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (which amounts to not using a calibrated profile for that monitor) and then relaunching Affinity Photo. I really don't want to do that every time I open Affinity Photo, not in the least because it of course affects all other apps which I might be looking at on that monitor as well.

Edited by MLS
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It also seems... let's say counterintuitive that the color profile of the monitor that the Affinity Photo app gets launched on should determine the color management inside Affinity Photo for the duration that it is open. Doesn't that mean that if I move the Affinity Photo application window to another monitor, the colors there will always be wrong (since that monitor will be using a different, calibrated profile than the first monitor)?  I was wrong about this bit. See below.

Edited by MLS
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13 minutes ago, MLS said:

It also seems... let's say counterintuitive that the color profile of the monitor that the Affinity Photo app gets launched on should affect the color management inside Affinity Photo for the duration that it is open. Doesn't that mean that if I move the Affinity Photo application window to another monitor, the colors there will always be wrong (since that monitor will be using a different, calibrated profile than the first monitor)?

Going to check that out.

Just got my 48 inch OLED which I calibrated directly/internally, so will see what happens if I leave the calibration on or off on the other screen.

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19 minutes ago, MLS said:

Doesn't that mean that if I move the Affinity Photo application window to another monitor, the colors there will always be wrong (since that monitor will be using a different, calibrated profile than the first monitor)?

Affinity should take into account each monitor and each colour profile and the colours in your document should be accurately represented on either monitor, using either profile. As below -

On 12/27/2019 at 12:29 PM, Dan C said:

Affinity apps perform what is called document-to-screen colour profile conversion. This means that the colour values (or ‘numbers’ as we might refer to them) are translated from their initial document values based on the current display profile

However as you have mentioned above, there are some known issues with certain calibrated profiles and in these cases we recommend using an sRGB ICC profile for your monitor, to ensure colours are accurately reproduced in Affinity.

If you haven't already, I recommend posting in the Bug Reporting section of the forums if you have a calibrated colour profile that is known to be causing issues with Affinity and no other apps - if you can provide a copy of this ICC there then our QA team can log these with our developers, so that we can work to resolve this for a future update. Many thanks :)

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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16 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Affinity should take into account each monitor and each colour profile and the colours in your document should be accurately represented on either monitor, using either profile. As below -

Yeah, you're right. I just verified the behavior by dragging the AP window from monitor #1 to monitor #2, and I can see the colors of the document change as soon as I stop dragging the window (thus placing the window on monitor #2), which I take to mean that AP is now taking monitor #2's ICC profile into account. Sorry for the false alarm, then. My bad.

Edited by MLS
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