Affinity rendering colours incorrectly in workspace (but outputting them correctly)

[Unlikely Moniker]

Affinity Publisher workspace recently started rendering colours differrently to all other apps on my PC. For example, if I set the RGB sliders to 255, 0, 0, i.e. red, the resulting swatch colour is noticeably orange and a colour picker such as Pixie or the Windows Powertools picker shows the swatch as RGB 246, 47, 20. 

Colours are consistently "off" across the spectrum and across sessions. The problem doesn't appear to be caused by instability. The same problem appears in Photo and Designer.

Example:

Here's how Publisher renders a fairly cool, mid-dark green colour: RGB 4, 99, 7. As you can see the external picker reads it as rgb(74, 114, 8). The document's colour format is set to RGB/8 and the colour profile is sRGB IEC61966-2.1. 

Below is the above Publisher file exported as a PDF, using the digital high quality preset with colours set to RGB/8 and sRGB IEC61966-2.1.

 

The green is rendered how I'd expect RGB 4, 99, 7, to look like. Windows' colour picker agrees.

Lastly here's the two colours next to each other in MS Word to illustrate that it seems to be Publisher that's having a problem with colour rendering, not other apps or necessarily my monitor. 

This is my Publisher's colour setup in Preferences (Publisher default I believe): 

  

My graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 Series with the most recent driver available. The monitor is a Dell SP2309W on the standard preset. Windows colour management profile is sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile. This is the same setup under which Publisher rendered colours reliably before.  However, I have tried just about every combination of colour profile, monitor preset, contrast/brightness, Publisher colour management option and software calibration to see whether it made a difference. Unfortunately it didn't.

Does anyone have any ideas why it's only my Affinity apps that render colours in a way that means that colour pickers show different RGBs to the one set in Affinity's colour Studio, whereas all my other apps render the expected colour consistently? Could it be a workspace rendering issue, since exported images and PDFs show the colours correctly?  

If it was a monitor problem, surely I'd be seeing inconsistencies with colours everywhere, not solely in the Affinity apps?

Could this be related to the "washed out colours" issue reported in the past? Were any of those users able to resolve it? 

[Pšenda]

ICC profile for monitor in OS is OK? 

[Unlikely Moniker]

Hi Pšenda,

Thank you for your reply. This is the profile for the monitor:

I think that should be OK? 

In the meantime I should receive a new BenQ PD2700Q monitor today and I will see how that works and report further....

 

[Pšenda]

This will not be a problem with the monitor/video adapter, because the colors not only "look" differently, but also have other values - that is, they are "calculated" differently.
Therefore, I would look for a problem in the ICC profile (monitor, document), when this difference may occur.
Example file?

[Unlikely Moniker]

RGB/IEC61966-2.1 afpub file showing RGB values divergence between Publisher and Windows screen picker. Yellow agrees but not red and cyan. 

The pdf is the above file, exported on the 'digital high quality' setting, also RGB/IEC61966-2.1. The output RGBs now agree with the pnes set in Publisher. 

I have installed Publisher on another machine, ASUS laptop. On that screen, all the RGBs are OK.

Laptop version is 1.84 though, vs. 1.85 on Dell PC/monitor.

publisher-cyan-red-yellow.afpub publisher-cyan-red-yellow.pdf

[Pšenda]

Isn't problem for me.

[Unlikely Moniker]

Confirms the problem is restricted to just the Affinity apps on my Dell Inspiron, not your machine or my laptop. 

Back to the original question, since the Affinity apps are the only ones on that PC that have the problem - not MS Office, Paint, Paint Shop Pro, Drawplus, Pageplus, etc. etc - does anyone have a suggestion why Affinity might behave differently?

Maybe if I back up my shortcuts etc and completely remove Affinity including everything in AppData?

 

 

 

[Pšenda]

The problem/difference in displaying data in Affinity vs other applications is often that, unlike Affinity, which uses defined ICC profiles properly and correctly when displayed (especially for the monitor in the OS), other applications do not.
You can try to reset the monitor calibration, which you probably did (see your screenshot), and which could somehow affect the way the application is displayed,
or the factory reset of the application. However, since you have exactly the same problem in two different Affinity applications, this is a common problem, not some local configuration/failure in both application.

[Unlikely Moniker]

Thank you for the help. I have been able to (almost) solve the problem. It was indeed related to the Dell monitor driver.

I had tried reinstalling the driver and trying update it (although there wasn't much point since the monitor and driver are pretty old by now).

I had not checked the driver file details, though. That showed the generic Windows driver location plus the SP2309W.ICM file (in  C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color).

I renamed the SP2309W file as .old and restarted. Now Affinity shows (almost) the right colours - cyan is perfect, red a tiny bit off as in 255 2 3 and yellow is ever so slightly bluer at 255 253 31.  

Anyway, I can live with that. Do you think the Dell SP2309 profile is one of the ones that doesn't work well with Affinity? I'll attach it in case someone wants a look.

Hopefully the BENQ replacement will play nice with Affinity when it arrives.

 

 

 

SP2309W.ICM.old