Different colour on export

[Niall123492]

HI,

When I export documents from the Affinity apps on windows the colours appear more saturated on export than they are when I am working on the files.

Attached I have an example of what is happening, one image is of my window in Affinity designer and the other is a JPEG file after exporting.

[walt.farrell]

What color mode and profile do you have specified in Designer?

What file type are you exporting to?

In your Export options (More...) did you include the ICC profile in the output file?

[Niall123492]

Attached I have the colour settings I normally use.

I exported this file to JPEG but it seems to be the same with other file types also. When I uploaded the images to this forum again they are different colours than what I see on  my laptop. Very frustrating when i am trying to work with colours.

For this JPEG file I included the same colour profile that is in my settings.

[walt.farrell]

Thanks, but what is the color model you're using for your Designer document?

CMYK, RGB?

[Niall123492]

RGB/8 as what I am trying to create will be used mainly on the web.

[thomaso]

To make it less complicated: Make sure

1. your documents color space
2. the color model of your rectangle color/color swatch
3. your JPG export color space

are ALL set to RGB. If that doesn't prevent the difference: can you upload your AD file + jpg?

[Niall123492]

Still different, I am just using this file as an example as its a problem I keep facing. This colour is one I am using for a branding project at the minute.

affinity-square-orange.afdesign

[thomaso]

Your jpg appears not to have the profile embedded. What if you embed it on export?

I get quite same appearance in AD and JPG (macOS preview.app):

[Niall123492]

I have the embedded profile option checked. 🤔

Maybe it has something to do with my laptop display. It's 4k with 100% Adobe RGB and 95% NTSC colour gamut. 

 

[Niall123492]

Also, when I upload the images to this forum the brighter JPG image is pretty accurate to what I am seeing in my Affinity Designer app. 

They seem to lose saturation when I upload, but still there is a difference between the 2 images.

[thomaso]

Maybe your uploaded JPG looses some of its metadata on the way via web and therefore doesn't tell me its profile. I see you have metadata checked on export but I get very few only compared to those from my exported jpg.

Your monitor is not the reason, regardless of its good quality, because it shows all these files at same conditions. I rather suspect your JPG viewing app as the culprit. In the attached AD I have placed your JPG (downloaded) and mine (exported) besides your rectangle shape object. They all look the same here. – How do you get see them? And if they are diferent, how does your JPG appear when you place it in your AD file?

affinity-square-orange_& jpgs.afdesign

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[Niall123492]

12 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Maybe your uploaded JPG looses some of its metadata on the way via web and therefore doesn't tell me its profile. I see you have metadata checked on export but I get very few only compared to those from my exported jpg.

Your monitor is not the reason, regardless of its good quality, because it shows all these files at same conditions. I rather suspect your JPG viewing app as the culprit. In the attached AD I have placed your JPG (downloaded) and mine (exported) besides your rectangle shape object. They all look the same here. – How do you get see them? And if they are diferent, how does your JPG appear when you place it in your AD file?

affinity-square-orange_& jpgs.afdesign

Yeah they all look the same on my screen also. When I bring the same JPG file back into Affinity Designer it shows the same colour that I want it to be. 

I am viewing the images in Windows Photos which must be showing the colours at my displays profile. 

[Niall123492]

17 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

As your display is a wide gamut device and you view images with apps like Photos, which is not color managed, it is clear that you get more saturated colors than when you use a color managed app as Affinity Photo. When you view images in non-color managed environment, the colors are shown at full color gamut of the device, rather than mapped according to color profiles embedded in the files, or mapped to sRGB in case the file is not color managed (as e.g. color-managed browsers do).

So it seems as if your system is behaving more or less as expected.   

The color profiles are stripped when you post images on the forum so basically your wide-gamut colors get mapped to the edges of the sRGB, and sRGB colors get less saturated and duller.

Thanks for the information. 

This must be the reason yes. The difference in colours was throwing me off as I don't want to send certain colours to a client and have them be completely different to what I am seeing.

[thomaso]

17 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

The color profiles are stripped when you post images on the forum

Always, in any case? I am quite sure to recall having seen profile info in images of other forum users, in particular an obvious monitor profile name I haven't read before, probably in a screenshot.

2 minutes ago, Niall123492 said:

I am viewing the images in Windows Photos which must be showing the colours at my displays profile. 

Ah, so this viewing app is responsible, as Lagarto pointed out, too. That would mean you don't need to worry about the difference – and/or should have this possible color variations in mind when continuing with your corporate design project.

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[thomaso]

4 minutes ago, Niall123492 said:

The difference in colours was throwing me off as I don't want to send certain colours to a client and have them be completely different to what I am seeing.

A more save way could be not to send JPG files but exported PDF/X-4. They don't loose anything on their web way and, as X-4, they also have the Output Intent which explicitly tells a viewing app for what profile they are made (which, of cause, does not help though if a viewing app can't work with profiles at all and isn't supported by its OS, too)

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[Niall123492]

3 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

That is much dependent on what viewer your clients are using to view the images. If the images are to be used on web, it is best to have them viewed on the web (so that by default a color managed browser like Chrome is used) because if just sent as email attachments, the colors are likely to be viewed on Windows platform and there typically non-color managed. This is not generally a problem because most of the users have monitors that are not capable of showing colors beyond the sRGB color gamut.

I have also noticed that Chromes PDF viewer really over saturates the colour. I want to send my finished design to my clients via PDF so they can view it. Using Chrome's PDF viewer that orange colour is way over saturated. This was where my main worries came from. 

Thanks for getting back to me on this problem, really appreciate it. 🙌

[thomaso]

> I am not sure.

Possibly a change occurred with the forums software update a while ago? At least it affects uploads: I get its –200 error message more often and need to run screenshots (jpg) almost always through a "optimizer" (ImageOptim.app) to prevent –200.

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[Wosven]

27 minutes ago, Niall123492 said:

have also noticed that Chromes PDF viewer really over saturates the colour.

If your clients open PDF, ask them to use Adobe's Acrobat Reader and to avoid browser's PDF viewer that usually are a javascript viewer. They can use other apps, but  it's common and well known. Other readers can not correctly read profiles or some effects, resulting in wrong colours.

[Niall123492]

4 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

Chrome PDF viewer seems to be non-color managed:

Yeah I guessed that after you told me about windows photos. Uploading the PDF to google drive and viewing it within the Drive PDF viewer seems to show accurate colours. 

Also, can you guys recommend any photo viewing apps that are colour managed?

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