Created design with bad monitor color profile — can this be salvaged?

[fparedes]

Hi all,

First time poster, having started using Affinity Designer just a couple weeks ago for a class project.

I've really enjoyed using the tool so far, but I hit a wall yesterday when I attempted to export my work and found that what I saw as lovely earth tones in AD looked weirdly blue/purple when exported (see attachments).

After much trial, error and double-checking, I came across this post that pointed at the monitor color profile (Samsung Natural Color Pro 1.0 ICM) as the possible culprit. Sure enough, I replaced it with a standard sRGB profile, reopened my design in AD and... it now looks just as blue as the exported file. Seems like AD had been compensating all along for what it perceived as a horribly miscalibrated monitor by altering the colors of everything in my design. Yay. 🤦‍♂️

So, the good news is I'm now reasonably confident the root problem is fixed and my exports will  match the colors I see on screen from now on. The bad news is that my design has apparently had this horrible blue tinge all along and I have no clue how to fix it. 😭

So here's my question: is there any way to get AD to undo whatever color adjustments it made to compensate for the monitor profile (attached, just in case it's useful) and go back to the colors I originally thought I was using? Can I somehow apply a sort of global, reverse color correction to the whole design?

If push comes to shove, I guess I can just recreate the whole thing from scratch, but it would really make my day if there was an easier way to fix this.

In case it helps, my design can be downloaded here.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Fran

T260HD.icm

[Pšenda]

"Can I somehow apply a sort of global, reverse color correction to the whole design?"

Try LUT, which you create by comparing the correct color image with the incorrect one.

[lacerto]

(...)

[fparedes]

8 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Since the overall tinge comes from rectangles placed on top of the pages, I  would simply just adjust coloring of these rectangles (shown selected in the screenshots below) to get the desired look

Thanks so much, Lagarto, your advice was spot on! I never suspected it was the background rectangles changing the tint of the whole design. I had used an online color palette generator to set the overall scheme, so I simply went to my palette and switched the rectangles back to the color I had originally selected, and everything started looking the way it should once again. It was nothing short of magical!

And thanks for your suggestion about using a LUT too, Pšenda. I ended up not needing to go down that path: after fixing the backgrounds, the color temp of the images remained a bit colder than I had originally envisioned, but I've ended up liking how it looks — and for the couple images I needed to warm up a bit, I simply used HSL adjustments. Probably not great from a color accuracy perspective, but still a lot better than what I originally had! 😅

Again, thanks both for the save. Very, very grateful for your help. So relieved not to have to redo the whole thing!

Cheers,

Fran

Edited August 22, 2020 by fparedes