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Colour Management on second monitor


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I have just bought and downloaded Affinity Photo. My computer is a 27" 4k Apple iMac running on OS X Yosemite (fully up to date) but I do most of my photographic work on a second monitor attached to my iMac - an Eizo CG247 which I have colour calibrated using its own internal Colorimeter. Everything is fine in Affinity Photo when I use the iMac but as soon as I switch to the Eizo the colour goes very wrong - supersaturated. It appears that AP is not recognising the profile for the Eizo. Calling up the correct profile and applying it via the options under the DOCUMENTS menu makes no difference and nor does setting this profile in PREFERENCES.

 

Can you help?

 

Great Software but, for me, seriously flawed, if I cannot use it on the Eizo.

 

Thank you

 

Terry H.

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I don’t really understand, Paul. Using color management the way you do, disables you to compensate individual color divergences, because the monitor’s color rendering isn’t taken into account.

The "heart" of this section of color management (image <-> display) fundamentally consists of "translating" image colors into individual monitor colors. This isn’t possible, if you use an universal color profile instead of an individually adapted monitor profile..

But this leads too far here and is a little bit off topic …

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm currently using the trial, and although I love the speed and quality of the software, I have the exact same problem and it really is a deal breaker. I do most of my work on a cintiq, but have a fully better-quality calibrated monitor ( the cintiq is calibrated too ) to check color and always keep a view on the "big picture".

 

I did some testing, and it seems very clear that Affinity photo only respects the color profile of the MAIN monitor at launch - that is, the monitor that contains the menu bar. 

 

When my cintiq is the main monitor, the colors are all wrong on my calibrated monitor, and accurate on the cintiq. If I quit, change the menu bar to my calibrated monitor and relaunch, the calibrated monitor now has the correct profile applied, while the cintiq is completely wrong.

 

As much as I'd like to start migrating my photoshop workflow to affinity photo, this one bug makes it impossible. 

 

Are the debs aware of this and working on it? Should I try to contact them through a different method?

 

I'm going to go ahead and purchase anyway, because I love to support good software, but it's currently not useful to me until this is fixed.

 

Thank you,

 

Andres

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@Paul: If you use Adobe RGB for your monitor, it definitely isn't set up correct. A monitor needs a monitor profile. Adobe RGB is a picture profile. A monitor profile has to compensate divergences of a specific monitor from a specific picture profile.

I agree with mac_heibu here. This is not how color profiles work. Each monitor has their own profile - I use a calibrator to calculate it for each, and that is separate than the color space you work on. In my case, I work with photographs that have an Adobe RGB profile, but that has nothing to do with my monitors profile. The profiles job on the monitor is to show you as close as monitor-possible, the colors in your files. 

Color is complicated, and currently, Affinity photo has a few issues that don't make me fully trust it for a color-true pipeline.

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  • 5 months later...

I am glad i Finally found this posting. I have been pulling my hair out over this issue. Exactly the same problem with over saturated colours on the Eizo compared to Photoshop when opening files. Having now switched the display to mirror setting and opening affinity the colours are much closer to photoshop. Not ideal but it at least solves the issue.

 

Tony

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I do not have a high end color-calibrated second monitor to test with, just a Vizio 24" HDTV that I occasionally use as a second monitor with my iMac, so I don't know how relevant the following is to this discussion.

 

However, even with this setup, I get visually consistent color on both screens as long as I set each one up individually with the appropriate display profile in System Preferences > Displays > Color tab. I don't have a calibrator so this is not a precise comparison, but iMacs like mine come from the factory with a custom calibrated profile, so even though I am aware that won't be 100% accurate as the screen on the iMac ages, it is reasonably close, at least for my purposes. For the Vizio, I use a slightly tweaked version of the default HD 709-A profile that OS X assigns to it.

 

So with that in mind, I wonder if some or all of these color shift issues would go away if each monitor is set up with an appropriate display profile via the System Preferences > Displays > Color setting.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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you need to make the second monitor the main monitor for osx to do this go to monitor pref. - arrange tab - now  move the little withe bar on top of the mac frame to the external monitor - restart AP

 

dear developers when do we see a fix for this problem ?

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you need to make the second monitor the main monitor for osx to do this go to monitor pref. - arrange tab - now  move the little withe bar on top of the mac frame to the external monitor - restart AP

At least with the changes made to multi-monitor support in El Capitan, both monitors can (& by default I think do) have the white main menu bar visible. Whichever is the 'active' monitor displays it normally & the others display it partially greyed out. This works on-the-fly, without having to restart anything. If you are not seeing that & running El Capitan, drag the menu bar's white rectangle back to the internal monitor (or whichever one has the "Arrange" tab in the preference window) & you should have a main menu bar on all the screens.

 

Plus, as I said it is possible to set the display profile separately for each attached monitor -- just open System Preferences > Displays & a window appears on each monitor with Display & Color tabs. Then set the profile for each one in the Color tab for that display. I believe this should work for any monitor, but of course you need to have the appropriate profile stored on your Mac for each of them.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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imho the menu bar  behavior has nothing to do with this.  10.11 still has still a preferred main startup screen and it seems that AP only reaches for this profile, so when you move AP to the external display it has loaded the wrong profile and you get a color missmatch. 

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After doing some more experimenting with my setup, I (mostly) see what you mean. The problem seems to be that while the UI elements all use whatever profile is set in System Preferences on a per monitor basis, even when changing that on the fly (without relaunching the app), the document windows do not.

 

In fact, even with a single monitor configuration this seems to be true -- whatever display profile the screen or screens are set to at application launch time is what I am stuck with in every document window unless I relaunch the app after changing display profiles.

 

Does that sound like what you see?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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yes. and i can´t believe this is still not fixed ! !  on the screenshot  you can see the problem between PS which uses the correct display profile and AP when the image is moved to the second monitor.  

post-6494-0-46669000-1458404961_thumb.jpg

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I would appreciate it if everyone seeing this issue would please post something here about which OS version you are using, if you see the colors of UI elements shift when you change the system's display profile in System Preferences > Displays while the app is open, or if the same thing happens (that is, the UI colors shift but the documents' do not) if you change the system display profile when using only one monitor.

 

I think the root problem is, as csp said, that the app only uses whatever system display profile is set for the main monitor at launch time, & it does this for any & all monitors being used, but only for document windows. If everyone is seeing this same behavior, it suggests that the cause is some kind of error in how updating rendering document windows is handled, & that it isn't limited to multi-monitor setups.

 

If we can establish that this is what everybody sees, & if it occurs with all or some supported OS versions, then hopefully it will make it easier for the developers to fix.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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When i have AP open and change the color profile, the look of the whole display changes, Dock, AP, picture in AP, everything.

I thought this was intended because the whole monitor is affected by the profile. 

MBPr 2012 13 one monitor setup. Hope that helps, although I don´t think so.

 

 

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MBd, thanks for that info. I guess I need to do some more checking to make sure that on my system at least, everything except the document window (the picture in AP if only one document is open) changes....

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 6 months later...

As the person who started this thread over 1 year ago I am disappointed to discover that AP has still not addressed this problem of colour managment for a second monitor.

 

Sorry, guys and gals, but this is a terminal problem for me and will mean that I shall now uninstall AP and tell my colleagues in Cambridge Camera Club that it is not worth bothering with.

 

A pity because it was functionally quite good and had real potential but for me it's now back full-time to LR and PS with Nik plug-ins.

 

Terry H

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There is a shift in colour saturation between my 13" MBP screen and 24" HP w2408h. Colour shifts to less saturated when image window is dragged to 13" and shift happens after half a second wait.

I would think that is not how it should work?

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  • 4 weeks later...

Adding my voice to the need for proper color profiles to be used for each monitor. I have to be very careful as to what is my main monitor during launch, otherwise I can easily end up editing with the wrong colors on screen.

 

Currently, only the main monitor's profile is used ( the one with the menu bar in settings ) regardless of which monitor the document window is on . It defeats the whole purpose of having calibrated screens.

 

Thank you.

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