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Color picker showing black as 0% grey in all Affinity Applications


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I have a simple text document with a greyscale logo and chose as Color Format "Grey/8". I noticed that in this color format, the colorpicker identifies black as 0% grey and white as 100% grey. Obviously all other greyscale values are also shown with inverted values. This applies to all three Affinity Applications.

Attached a simple example to show the wrong greyscale values.

Ralf Maeder

publisher grey.jpg

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For "grey", mentally substitute "value" or "lightness".  Black is 0% lightness, white is 100% lightness.  The "grey scale" is the neutral hue scale of value/lightness.

For printing, you want to know the percentage of black ink.  So that's where 30% black comes from.  However, the "grey scale" is not the "black scale". (There is no "black scale".) So 30% black is indeed 70% lightness.

The confusion comes from putting additive (red, green, blue, value) and subtractive (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) terms next to one another.

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Dear sfriedberg, in a sense this may make sense.

But... in the end, isn't there at least a problem with how Affinity's color picker displays the 100% black rectangle with 0% grey?

If this none of the less is correct then I throw the towel because I don't get it. And I worked 20 years in PrePress.

Ralf Maeder

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It's a problem if you want it to be a problem.  On a press, it's 100% black.  On a monitor, it's 0% grey/value.  There is certainly room for confusion, but less room if you keep the context (print/subtractive, monitor/additive) in mind.

I am sure the folks at Affinity would be entertain your suggestions for how this confusing labeling could be sorted out.  How would you prefer this information be presented?  (And do remember, there are lots of other users, many of whom will never go to press with their digital files.)

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9 hours ago, sfriedberg said:

It's a problem if you want it to be a problem.  On a press, it's 100% black.  On a monitor, it's 0% grey/value.  There is certainly room for confusion, but less room if you keep the context (print/subtractive, monitor/additive) in mind.

I am sure the folks at Affinity would be entertain your suggestions for how this confusing labeling could be sorted out.  How would you prefer this information be presented?  (And do remember, there are lots of other users, many of whom will never go to press with their digital files.)

I have to acknowledge that normally I would not change the color mode to greyscale Grey/8.

I thought it would make sense in this case because the printed document contains only black and shades of black (grey). Maybe by doing so, I slided into the realms of photographers and raw processing? Hint is that apparently the way black and shades of black are defined is not comprehensive to me who is focused on normal CMYK and Spot color workflows. 

To answer your question about what I would have expected: that black is 100% grey, white is 0% grey and 30% black equals 30% grey, since it should be obvious that there exist only shades of black (grey) in a color mode that identifies as Grey/8. Furthermore I would expect that the 8 stands for 8bits per pixel = 256 different shades of grey and Grey/16 with 16bit = 65000 shades. 

Ralf Maeder

 

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