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Complete softproofing and color management functions (like in Adobe and other prof. software packages)


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What happend to that need?

Currently Affinity lacks complete colormanagement / softproof functionality.

Missing is:

1) Preserve RGB / CMYK numbers → this is needed to simulate how an RGB file will look like on a non-colormanaged RGB printer (like often in a photo lab) or how a CMYK file which will not be converted to another colour space will look in a specific CMYK space.
BTW, this option is also needed when you want to print out a (ICC color) calibration target from the Affinity application itself.

2 a) Option "Simulate Paper color" → this determines the rendering intent from the (converted) file to the monitor colour space regarding the white point:

"Simulate Paper = On" → absolute colorimetric conversion from the file to the monitor color space

                             = Off → relative colorimetric conversion from the file to the monitor color space

2b) "Simulate Black Ink" → determines if Black point compensation from the file to the monitor colour space is used or not

"Simulate Black Ink = On" → Blackpoint Compensation from File to Monitor Colour Space turned off

"Simulate Black Ink = Off" → Blackpoint Compensation from File to Monitor Color Space turned on

Affinity offers now a softproof and conversion of a file to another color space. But it lacks to control how the files are rendered to the monitor colour space!

The default rendering intent in Photoshop to the Monitor profile (color space) is: Relative colorimetric with blackpoint compensation and can be influenced like described here, which of course is a vital feature!

3) A preview for "Assign Profile" is also missing currently

4) A keyboard shortcut to toggle the softproof on / off can also be very handy and is missing now 😞

5) In Publisher I do not see an option to enable the softproof function for the complete document, but only for each page!? If that's not possible (which it seems) -- this is an additional need.

6) Exporting images: Currently there is lacking

6a) Choose rendering intent for the conversion

6b) Preview for this conversion (in the export dialog)

7) In "better" color managed programs one can also choose which CMM is used for the conversion -- which is now also lacking.

See here for the colour management options from Adobe: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/proofing-colors.html

The Affinity programs are great in many ways, but I am very much surprised that in 2020 those functions are not standard in a software which claims / tries to aim at the professional user. All professionals, who know and care about predictable color, and know how to use color management to achieve that, will not use Affinity products till those features are implemented. I did not remember exactly in which Photoshop version this was introduced, but it was a loooooong time ago. I think the current color management features already were introduced around 2000 with Photoshop 5.5 if memory serves me right.... ;-)

 

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15 hours ago, rpnfan said:

No one else needing full color mannagement features in Affinity products? I am much surprised...

Users of budget software? I am not surprised.

  • "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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Haha, I understand. Maybe you're right. But in that case it shows that Affinity has really not reached the professional world.
 

I personally have a professional background, but now need software just for private usage. So it seems for color critical work I'll still have to resort to my old Photoshop. What a pity. 😞

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3 hours ago, rpnfan said:

Haha, I understand. Maybe you're right. But in that case it shows that Affinity has really not reached the professional world.
I personally have a professional background, but now need software just for private usage. So it seems for color critical work I'll still have to resort to my old Photoshop. What a pity. 😞

I have too. Personally I have yet to meet ANYONE in professional circles who even HEARD about Serif or Affinity.

I too use it privately for what Affinity Designer is good at; painting on top of something like a drawing, sketch or a photo. Even there workflows are often slowed down by missing features or bad usability, but still overall a pleasant experience. Niche software. Photo is so far behind technically I just use it as finalizing software for hobby projects in Designer. A pixel persona++. 

Their marketing is so inflated it is laughable, fx this one about Photo: "Trusted by professionals. Affinity Photo has become the first choice for photography and creative professionals around the world, who love its speed, power and precision."

They should tone it doooooown and focus on the segment of users Serif ALWAYS sold to: hobbyists, amateurs and small companies. They will not fool professionals anyway. Why not just serve that segment with diginty and dedication while not fooling others with inflated city market marketing tricks? 

  • "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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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi,

I must disagree. I am not a professional but I hardly use soft proofing in Affinity Photo. I have found printing issue when color management for printing is performed by Affinity Photo.

Regards,

Edited by thornlab
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2 hours ago, thornlab said:

I have found printing issue when color management for printing is performed by Affinity Photo.

🤝

Edited by Jowday
Misunderstanding - no reason to keep the post
  • "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 think that You did not understood me. I mean that I agree that Affinity should have soft proofing capabilities that rpnfan wrote in this post. It is paid photo editing software and in my opinion it is a must to have such features, because they states on their page "Trusted by professionals".

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On 5/24/2020 at 5:57 PM, thornlab said:

I think that You did not understood me. I mean that I agree that Affinity should have soft proofing capabilities that rpnfan wrote in this post. It is paid photo editing software and in my opinion it is a must to have such features, because they states on their page "Trusted by professionals".

I certainly misunderstood you - I deleted the content of the post

  • "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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16 minutes ago, thornlab said:

If You are interested in soft proofing and printing I created an issue:

 

Thank you 🙂

BTW you entered your first name in the title field - it is for a heading for your post. You can simply edit it to a more meaningful title so it is easier to navigate the threads for the Serif staff and others.

Take care 😷

  • "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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4 hours ago, thornlab said:

Thanks. I did it by mistake - it is my first issue reported on this forum. I just fix the title.

Great, looks good. Thank you for taking your time and welcome to the forums. 🙂

  • "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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  • 4 weeks later...
On 4/18/2020 at 5:21 PM, rpnfan said:

Currently Affinity lacks complete colormanagement / softproof functionality.

This is a critical need that needs to be addressed. Has anyone from Serif commented on the reason for a lack of solid color management capabilities in their apps and whether they are going to do anything about it?

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As you see nobody from Serif commented. I took the time to sum up all colormanagement needs, but now feel that I wasted me time. Maybe helpful for others to see what to look for in another application. But my conclusion is that Serif is and will not be addressing the professional market -- at least not short term. Other statements from Serif to aim at professionals are just "advertisements" but are not reflected in the products themselves.

There is a surprisingly large group of "professionals" not using colormanagement (at all or fully), but the better professionals surely do know how to use color management and need and use it. I'll continue to use my old Photoshop version for color critical things, when Affinity does not offer the needed features... 😞

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1 hour ago, rpnfan said:

As you see nobody from Serif commented. I took the time to sum up all colormanagement needs, but now feel that I wasted me time. Maybe helpful for others to see what to look for in another application. But my conclusion is that Serif is and will not be addressing the professional market -- at least not short term. Other statements from Serif to aim at professionals are just "advertisements" but are not reflected in the products themselves.

There is a surprisingly large group of "professionals" not using colormanagement (at all or fully), but the better professionals surely do know how to use color management and need and use it. I'll continue to use my old Photoshop version for color critical things, when Affinity does not offer the needed features... 😞

Hi,

I agree with you that these features are needed, and in the case of Affinity Publisher even crucial. Trying to convince you that this is not software for professionals and your requests are not needed is just wrong. I go through this every time I write a post on this forum. 

I'm a professional and Affinity Suite is my only graphic software at the moment. I draw in it, I design, I make books and I see no reason to pay for Adobe CC. Maybe apart from Adobe Font and Adobe Acrobat, which has all the missing features you're asking for. This is my temporary (I hope) workaround.

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Yes, "professional" is just telling that someone earns money with his work. And you're right it's not the professional / amateur distinction which is relevant here. But in any case we can agree that a fully-enabled color management is missing currently, but is needed importantly!

But what could we do to convince Serif to implement this!?

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Corel releases their graphic suite every year, but as you can imagine after 20+ years, most changes are pretty small.  One of the most significant changes since CorelDRAW 5 (which is when I started with it) is the addition of real color management, and one of the biggest improvements several releases later was when they completely reworked both the UI and the color management engine.

Massive lesson learned: If you are going to do real color management, do not automatically, quietly, helpfully, do anything hidden from the user.  Color management is already too complicated.  Making silent conversions because it's "convenient" and "probably what the user wants" just produces a hair-pulling nightmare for the user and endless inquiries on support forums.  Make all the profiles and color models for all the sources/sinks (scanners [plural], monitors [plural], printers [plural], JPEG images, PDFs, etc) explicit.  Make all the transformation pathways explicit.  You can assign default values to those things, or take their assignments from the OS or input file metadata, just don't hide them!  And let the user install additional profiles and assign them explicitly. And let the user reset the profile for a specific source/sink to whatever the default was, without having to memorize it or use an external tool to read metadata or interrogate OS color management profile assignments.

I'd point out that Adobe didn't get this right for a long time, either.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I also strongly support the request for more complete soft proofing tools. 

Especially the simulation of the paper color would be really helpful when using expensive professional paper
(either by printing yourself or having the images printed externally). There really is a need to be able
to adjust the images to cope with the paper color to avoid disappointment when the images come back
from the printer - just as it happened to me last week. This can easily become really expensive when
printing large formats on expensive paper.

Greetings
Andreas

Edited by astraub
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On 6/27/2020 at 4:07 PM, rpnfan said:
On 9/8/2020 at 4:26 AM, rpnfan said:

Serif, are you listening? Do you care? Will we see full colormanagement enabled anytime in the not too far future?

 

I completely agree: Full color management following the ICC specifications with an easy to understand UI. I don't understand why they are not weighing in on this.

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Hello @astraub, welcome to the forum
and hello @panelson3,

 

2 hours ago, astraub said:

There really is a need to be able to adjust the images to cope with the paper color to avoid disappointment when the images come back
from the printer

&

1 hour ago, panelson3 said:

I don't understand why they are not weighing in on this.

 

to both of you, please take into account that APub still is a rather 'young' application. There are so many aspects to create and develop a truely professional publishing software. All of these just can't be done in a short time or with the initial release. So, please, be patient.

Actually I do have high hopes that we - at some time - do get soft proofing capabilities. It just will take its (and their) time 🙂

Cheers,
d.

Affinity Designer 1 & 2   |   Affinity Photo 1 & 2   |   Affinity Publisher 1 & 2
Affinity Designer 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Photo 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Publisher 2 for iPad

Windows 11 64-bit - Core i7 - 16GB - Intel HD Graphics 4600 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
iPad pro 9.7" + Apple Pencil

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16 hours ago, astraub said:

I would be mostly interested in such an addition for Affinity Photo ....

I understand. As we are in the section that is about the all of the applications this was not obvious from your post. Sorry.

As I said before, it is a valid suggestion, it will just take it's time.

d.

Affinity Designer 1 & 2   |   Affinity Photo 1 & 2   |   Affinity Publisher 1 & 2
Affinity Designer 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Photo 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Publisher 2 for iPad

Windows 11 64-bit - Core i7 - 16GB - Intel HD Graphics 4600 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
iPad pro 9.7" + Apple Pencil

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  • 2 weeks later...

As a pro I am almost happy with Affinity's color management.

I miss paper simulation.

I miss printing from Affinity (with preserving CMYK values eg for black fonts). I have to export to PDF and print from there.

off topic: I have to have an Acrobat-like preflight for print ready PDFs. Affinity only checks before exporting. I also need it afterwards.

I have to say that PDFs exported by Affinity have way less warnings in Acrobat preflight than PDFs exported by InDesign. Most of the time I simply get a green Checkmark  

 

 

Advertising designer - Austria —  Photo - Publisher - Designer — CS6 d&wP — Mac Pro 5,1 (4,1 2009) 48GB 2x X5690 - RX580 - 970EVO - OS X 10.14.6 - NEC2690wuxi2 - CD20"—  iPad Pro 12.9" gen1 128 GB - Pencil

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