Color picker not picking colors outside Affinity Photo

[velarde]

Hello

I've noticed the behavior since several Photo updates. Not sure when it started but here's the thing..

I'm using the little color picker in the Colour panel.

In the beginning I remember it was VERY useful. You could drag and pick a color from anywhere visible in your screen. 

Now it only picks colors that are inside the Affinity Photo interface. Not at useful now. 🥺

 

Before, if I was browsing a webpage, and it just had to have a little piece showing underneath Photo (I'm using separate window workplace), I could pick any color there. Or maybe a little color from my desktop background.. in short anywhere...

 

Is this a bug or a preference I now have to check somewhere?  

It looks like the color picker is trying to pick color outside of Affinity but they are WAY off.  Only the colors that I pick from images I have open or the Affinity toolbar work.

 

Has anybody else experienced this...?  I'm in a iMac Late 2015, Running MACOS 11.5.2

 

 

[GFS]

I was curious, so I just tried it with Safari.  It works for me.  This is the colour of your nose - F5DDD6

One thing to be aware of, is your colour management settings.  If your Mac and Affinity do not happen to be profiled in a similar way, then maybe Affinity is not doing any colour conversion when a colour is copied from outside of its space.  So if you're working in cmyk in Affinity, perhaps colours grabbed from Safari/Desktop/others, which will be in RGB, are not being converted??

I have no idea if this is the case, since I've been working in AdobeRGB or as close as I can get, since forever and so, both spaces would be very similar for me.  That said... I've just tried my Desktop colour (which is a flat colour) and it does not show *identically* if I copy it into Affinity, but it's close.  So I'd guess I'm maybe right about the profiles.

 

[NotMyFault]

11 hours ago, velarde said:

Hello

I've noticed the behavior since several Photo updates. Not sure when it started but here's the thing..

I'm using the little color picker in the Colour panel.

In the beginning I remember it was VERY useful. You could drag and pick a color from anywhere visible in your screen. 

Now it only picks colors that are inside the Affinity Photo interface. Not at useful now. 🥺

 

You need to give Photo the rights to access anything outside Photo. The request pops up the first time you start Photo. If you reject, it cannot work outside it's own window.

 

[GFS]

Just to add...

A little further fiddling shows that, for me, AFP is not colour-managing colours from outside its own windows, although it does accept them.  For non-imaging stuff, I use a little app called ColorSlurp, to manage palettes of colour and to simplify copying colours into an app.  When I use it to copy the hex value of my Desktop background and paste that value into AFP, the colour is correct and when I simply read the RGB values in ColorSlurp and replicate them in AFP, the colour is correct.

So in summary I'd say that what I said previously is correct.  AFP does not colour-manage colours grabbed from outside its own windows.  Basically, it doesn't know your outside its window.

[velarde]

3 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

You need to give Photo the rights to access anything outside Photo. The request pops up the first time you start Photo. If you reject, it cannot work outside it's own window.

 

THANK YOU Very much!

That was it.. a Mac OS Security permission thing... Wouldn't have guessed.

I think I remembered that notification a while back and never thought it was related to this. 

 

I have the color picker working again!