Colours aren't displaying properly

[Throne777]

At first I thought my eyes were going funny, but Affinity sometimes doesn't show colours correctly and I have no idea why. See screenshot. Both highlighted circles are white, except in Affinity it clearly isn't white, it's got a yellowish hue to it. That fill colour is RGB = 255 / 255 / 255, so why is it not white (it's the top layer by the way, so nothing should be applying to it - even if it was it still doesn't look right in the Fill: boxl)? I wondered if it was just my screen going mad (it's a Surface Pro Laptop 3 in case that helps), but I checked the screenshot on my phone screen and you can still see a colour difference. What's going on?

I also run Affinity Photo on Mac and I've never seen this issue.

Thanks for your help!

[walt.farrell]

Probably:

 

[Throne777]

5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Probably:

 

Just switched it from 'Enhanced' to 'sRGB' and the issue is still there.

 

Also, the canvas can display white, weirdly. See screenshot.

Edited August 17, 2020 by Throne777
Screenshots

[Chris B]

Back in the Colour Management window, on Advanced, what is the Device Profile set to? Can you screenshot both the Advanced Panel and the Devices Panel please?

[Throne777]

These ones?

[Mark Ingram]

@Throne777, is that the default profile (SurfacesRGB.icm) that came with your Surface Pro 3 laptop?

[- S -]

On 8/17/2020 at 1:00 PM, Throne777 said:

At first I thought my eyes were going funny, but Affinity sometimes doesn't show colours correctly and I have no idea why. See screenshot. Both highlighted circles are white, except in Affinity it clearly isn't white, it's got a yellowish hue to it. That fill colour is RGB = 255 / 255 / 255, so why is it not white (it's the top layer by the way, so nothing should be applying to it - even if it was it still doesn't look right in the Fill: boxl)? I wondered if it was just my screen going mad (it's a Surface Pro Laptop 3 in case that helps), but I checked the screenshot on my phone screen and you can still see a colour difference. What's going on?

Looking at the display model number (LQ150P1JX51), that's a display from a 15" Surface Laptop 3, rather than a Surface Pro.  Although, I'm guessing that's just a typo.

"…it is a Sharp LQ150P1JX51 panel made especially for the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3. It is Sharp factory calibrated to 100% sRGB, Delta E <1 and also offers an enhanced mode (saturated)."

 

12 hours ago, Mark Ingram said:

@Throne777, is that the default profile (SurfacesRGB.icm) that came with your Surface Pro 3 laptop?

Until the OP replies, the ICM colour profile name does match the Surface Laptop 3 ICM colour profile.  Someone has previously posted about this colour profile on the Microsoft website – however, over the years, I've yet to see a display/hardware manufacturer give a technical reason why some of their ICC/ICM display colour profiles display one of the RGB colour channels oddly:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/surface-pro-icm-profile-has-wrong-header-size-and/cb29ce76-9ebc-42f7-954a-63c3868a33e8

Interestingly, if I extract the ICM display colour profiles directly from the Surface Laptop 3 driver MSI files, the ICM colour profile included with the Intel drivers displays 255,255,255 as white (at least in Windows Sandbox, on an Intel desktop machine, with a Dell monitor), however the one included with the AMD drivers gives a yellow colour cast.

Surface Laptop 3 (with Intel Processor Drivers and Firmware):

MSI link:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=100429

Extract MSI command:

msiexec /a C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\Desktop\SurfaceLaptop3_Win10_18362_20.072.28623.0.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\Desktop\MSIOutput

The extracted ICM profiles from the Intel MSI file (Zip file):

SurfaceOemPanel (Intel).zip

Screenshot:

Surface Laptop 3 (with AMD Processor Drivers and Firmware):

MSI link:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=100428

Extract MSI command:

msiexec /a C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\Desktop\SurfaceLaptop3_Win10_18362_20.053.37902.0.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:\Users\WDAGUtilityAccount\Desktop\MSIOutput

The extracted ICM profiles from the AMD MSI file (Zip file):

surfaceoempanel (AMD).zip

Screenshot:

 

[Mark Ingram]

Excellent detective work @- S - , thanks very much. I'm going to give that AMD profile a try, and see what happens here...

[Mark Ingram]

For a long time I've tried to acquire a colour profile that displays whites as yellow (I've seen a lot of reports over the years...), but never succeeded, every file provided by a customers has worked as intended... However, the AMD profile does incorrectly show whites as yellow.

Here's Designer:

And here's Photoshop:

 

The only interesting difference is that the document background in Designer is correctly drawn as white, which means the background colour is bypassing the colour profile conversion (normally not much of an issue, but a useful debugging feature now I guess)!

It would be good for us to try to detect these kinds of broken monitor profiles, and disable colour profile conversion, and give a message to the user.

[SamMN]

OP here under my work username (as I'm at work). Yes, it's a Surface Laptop 3, the Pro bit was a typo (it's one of these things). No external monitor connected.

Yes, it's the colour profiles that are the default on the machine provided by Windows. I haven't altered the colour profiles at all or downloaded new ones (changing from Enhanced to sRGB is the first change I'd made to it - to be clear, the default setting on the Surface Laptop 3 is Enhanced, I had to change the default to sRGB). Let me know if I need to provide more screenshots or I've missed a question! 🙂

Thanks again for all your investigative work!

 

[Mark Ingram]

Some more interesting info for future reference.

The Intel ICC profile header reports the size as 7032 bytes. Looking at the file size and tag data, the size is actually 7200 bytes. If I manually fix this, it doesn't make a difference, the Intel version still shows white as white.

If I modify the AMD profile to have the same RGB tristimulus values as the Intel version, the AMD version no longer shows white as yellow.

This looks like an intentional configuration step by AMD - for what reason, I don't know. If both the Intel and AMD versions use the same panel, I can't think of a reason why they'd need a different ICC profile?

At this point, I think all we can say is, we correctly load the default monitor profile, and we correctly convert colours (as does Photoshop). From here, this is probably a bug for Microsoft or AMD to sort out (and for other similar scenarios - whoever made the ICC profile).

[Throne777]

17 hours ago, Mark Ingram said:

Some more interesting info for future reference.

The Intel ICC profile header reports the size as 7032 bytes. Looking at the file size and tag data, the size is actually 7200 bytes. If I manually fix this, it doesn't make a difference, the Intel version still shows white as white.

If I modify the AMD profile to have the same RGB tristimulus values as the Intel version, the AMD version no longer shows white as yellow.

This looks like an intentional configuration step by AMD - for what reason, I don't know. If both the Intel and AMD versions use the same panel, I can't think of a reason why they'd need a different ICC profile?

At this point, I think all we can say is, we correctly load the default monitor profile, and we correctly convert colours (as does Photoshop). From here, this is probably a bug for Microsoft or AMD to sort out (and for other similar scenarios - whoever made the ICC profile).

Is there anything I can do in the meantime because currently my Affinity suite is useless if I can't get the colour white 😕 How do I correct the colour profile?

[- S -]

22 hours ago, Throne777 said:

Is there anything I can do in the meantime because currently my Affinity suite is useless if I can't get the colour white 😕 How do I correct the colour profile?

I would use the monitor ICM colour profiles that Microsoft supply for the Intel Surface Laptop 3.

1) Download the "SurfaceOemPanel (Intel).zip" file from my post above.

2) Follow the below video.

 

[Mark Ingram]

23 hours ago, Throne777 said:

Is there anything I can do in the meantime because currently my Affinity suite is useless if I can't get the colour white 😕 How do I correct the colour profile?

Either follow @- S -'s advice above, or set your monitor profile to the default sRGB profile. I've reported the issue to Microsoft directly.

[Throne777]

@- S - Thanks for the video! I can confirm that doing this worked, thank you so much! I didn't remove the two AMD profiles (just in case the Intel colour profiles didn't work or whatever), I'm assuming this won't cause any issues / conflicts?

 

On 8/20/2020 at 11:38 AM, Mark Ingram said:

Either follow @- S -'s advice above, or set your monitor profile to the default sRGB profile. I've reported the issue to Microsoft directly.

Both the Enhanced and the sRGB profiles have the yellow box issue. Thankfully, using the Intel one works 🙂 Thank you for reporting it to Microsoft. What I can't fathom is that I surely can't be the first person to use this Surface Laptop for photo editing, I mean the main draw of this laptop was that it is probably the closest thing to a Macbook in terms of build quality, screen, decent spec, etc. It's the sort of laptop you'd get specifically for this kind of work. Odd.

(Sorry for the delay in replying, been a bit hectic lately)

[Mark Ingram]

17 hours ago, Throne777 said:

@- S - Thanks for the video! I can confirm that doing this worked, thank you so much! I didn't remove the two AMD profiles (just in case the Intel colour profiles didn't work or whatever), I'm assuming this won't cause any issues / conflicts?

 

Both the Enhanced and the sRGB profiles have the yellow box issue. Thankfully, using the Intel one works 🙂 Thank you for reporting it to Microsoft. What I can't fathom is that I surely can't be the first person to use this Surface Laptop for photo editing, I mean the main draw of this laptop was that it is probably the closest thing to a Macbook in terms of build quality, screen, decent spec, etc. It's the sort of laptop you'd get specifically for this kind of work. Odd.

(Sorry for the delay in replying, been a bit hectic lately)

No problem! Yes, I was a little confused too. I've still not heard back from Microsoft, will chase them about it.