Variable exposure when opening raw files

[DaftStan]

Hi,

I'm new to Affinity Photo and like what I see so far apart from one annoying concern. On opening several raw files I noticed that they were a little dark (and noticeably darker than on Olympus Workspace & Raw Therapee) and my first edit was to lift the exposure by one stop. When I look at the histogram it is noticeably to the left, again compared to Olympus Workspace. I proceeded to write a macro and batch process a number of files to "correct" the exposure by one stop. Whilst the macro and batch processing worked fine I now notice that one or two files are now over exposed. On further investigation I opened several files manually and note that the majority are "dark" and a minority are "fine", so there seems to be some inconsistency, of course running the batch process with the macro renders the majority "fine" and a minority "bright"

Any thoughts ?

 

Thanks

 

[Lee D]

Hi @DaftStan Welcome to the forums.

Comparing RAW images in different apps will result in differences as they won't process the data in the same way. If you're using Affinity Photo on macOS you can switch RAW engines in the Develop personas assistant between our own SerifLABS and Apples CORE Image to see if the processing is different. Also within the Develop assistant options are ones to apply a Exposure Bias or a Tone Curve on opening or take no action

Windows users have the same assistant options available, apart from switching the RAW to Apples, this is just on macOS.

[DaftStan]

Hi Lee,

Thanks for the response. I checked out the develop assistant, there is no exposure bias at play in the images in question so this makes no difference, the tone curve does lift the images slightly but for most images it's not enough. I've played around with numerous setting and can get to where I need to be using the tone curve, however for some images I'm having to pull the curves in opposite directions to other images. I shoot raw and JPEG and when using Olympus Workspace and Raw Therapee the raw images look very similar to the JPEGS "out of the box", with Affinity most (but not all) of the Raw files are noticeably darker than the JPEGS and require tonal adjustments (I know this is part of the editing process). The main issue is the inconsistency between raw images in Affinity, some curves need pulling up whereas others need pulling down. I could live with the differences between different apps but would have hoped for some consistency. As mentioned previously I could script a macro to adjust all files to give a better starting point but this would only work if the raw files came "out of the box" in a consistent manner. 

Thanks again.