Wrong colours

[Helmar]

Why is it that if I screenshot a section and drag it into Designer, that the colours are off? See screenshot.

[Dan C]

Hi @Helmar,

Sorry to see you're having trouble! This is usually caused due to colour spaces/profiles. Can you please confirm for me:

• What colour space / ICC profile is in use for your document?
• Do you have a profile set against your monitor, through Mac OS?

Many thanks in advance!

[Mags1892]

affinity will be displaying the image with an ICC applied, preview is not unless you specifically ask it to you can assign a profile and also use a proof profile in preview

 

 

[lepr]

2 hours ago, Mags1892 said:

affinity will be displaying the image with an ICC applied, preview is not unless you specifically ask it to you can assign a profile and also use a proof profile in preview

Sorry, but you have been misinformed about Preview app.

The Mac screen shot will have the display colour profile embedded. Apple's Preview app is colour managed and correctly displays such images without the user messing around with assigning a profile and soft proofing.

Affinity apps can mismanage the display of images which have an Apple factory display profile embedded. When the Mac system has multiple display profiles installed, Affinity apps can silently assign a wrong one when opening a screenshot which has an embedded factory display profile, instead of simply using the image's embedded profile.

I've written about this and provided a solution before, but the post will  have been deleted during a purge I made some time ago. I'm really too busy at the moment to rewrite it, but, in short, if you create and use a bespoke (in other words, non-factory) profile for the Mac's display, then Affinity apps will correctly handle screenshots with that profile.

[Helmar]

On 9/24/2020 at 4:43 PM, anon2 said:

I'm really too busy at the moment to rewrite it, but, in short, if you create and use a bespoke (in other words, non-factory) profile for the Mac's display, then Affinity apps will correctly handle screenshots with that profile.

That did the trick.  Thank you!

@Dan C Must have been my mistake, because I had the document profile set to my external monitor whereas I'm currently using the MBP display only. So I did as @anon2 said, and created a new profile, and also changed the doc profile back to the newly created one. Then did the screenshot, imported it, and all is well! 

Cheers,

Helmar

[thomaso]

12 hours ago, Helmar said:

I had the document profile set to my external monitor whereas I'm currently using the MBP display only. So I (...) created a new profile, and also changed the doc profile back to the newly created one.

Do I understand right that you assigned your monitor profile (custom or factory) as document profile in APub?

If yes, this way the document is specified to your specific monitor, so if opened on a different computer (> monitor) the document doesn't have access to this specific profile and might appear differently. With other words when using your monitor profile as document profile you kind of unnecessarily "double" the use of this monitor profile for your mac : the monitor profile gets data from APub in its (this monitor's) colors + then the macOS color management (colorsync) transfers/displays these .afpub's colors into this monitor profile once more – because they are the same you don't see a difference and feel it "did the trick". Now, if you display the document on your other screen (which is adjusted by macOS with a different monitor profile) the colors may shift again ... and you might want to assign the document profile again accordingly to the monitor which displays the document.

A more useful approach would be to use for RGB documents in APub a more general ("independent", "standard") RGB profile – and let macOS do the color adjustment to display the document window accordingly to the respective monitor.

Consider that when working in a CMYK document you have no chance to assign your custom monitor profile in APub but need to choose a CMYK profile. The colors of such a document again get adjusted for displaying on your specific monitor by macOS without harm, that's the sense of its color management.