Affininity photo opening raw files too dark

[Muffindell]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

Yes, I think you are right about that, but the point is how image sensor data is stored & what & how image metadata is stored in the CR2 format varies by camera model, so it is the combination of camera & lens that determines if or to what extent a RAW engine can process it.

IOW, supporting one Canon camera model that outputs CR2 RAW files does not mean all others are automatically supported.

Metadata is either a separate data tag or one that is included within the image data, it is purely for information and has no bearing on how an image is displayed. A CR2 metadata file attributes from say a canon 550D is no different from the one stored in a canon 1DX, that is how software is able to look in the same place to determine say lens data, or exposure. The point is that it is consistent across all cameras using that file format. 

In my own case, we are talking about two different file formats behaving unexpectedly in a similar manor. This can only point to an application software issue and how it incorrectly processes the image information; this is confirmed by the fact that the major competitor produces software that does not have this problem and interprets the information as intended first time, every time without user intervention.

I'm a great fan of Serif and have used lots of software produced by them over the years, usually with much success. Unfortunately, Affinity seems to have a major bug in it's programming that should have been picked up at it's inception. That said, a company should always be judged by how quickly that it resolves problems brought to its attention, especially fundamental issues such as importing a RAW image file and displaying it as intended. However, I see little to inspire me, since several users on this forum raising the same issues in November 2021  have obviously made no impact in the form of a patch, work around or disclaimer. Just saying 'we are working to resolving this issue' is totally unacceptable, especially since Affinity is meant to be wooing customers from the market leader. Having had over 6 months to figure the problem out and come up with a solution it's about time users had a fully working product.

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by Muffindell
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[NotMyFault]

You may mix up (assumed) bugs and design decisions.

What you rate as bug maybe “works as designed” in Affinity’s view. The App plays in the same domain as competitors, but it deviates in some aspects like UI and functionality intentionally.

I’m personally dissatisfied with the capabilities of Develop Persona and use it only as quick and dirty way if i don’t want to fire up the more capable (quality wise) DPP, which is so slow that it hurts, but has it merits when batch processing and working with recipes.

 

[Muffindell]

2 minutes ago, NotMyFault said:

You may mix up (assumed) bugs and design decisions.

What you rate as bug maybe “works as designed” in Affinity’s view. The App plays in the same domain as competitors, but it deviates in some aspects like UI and functionality intentionally.

I’m personally dissatisfied with the capabilities of Develop Persona and use it only as quick and dirty way if i don’t want to fire up the more capable (quality wise) DPP, which is so slow that it hurts, but has it merits when batch processing and working with recipes.

 

If you pitch yourself against the main player in the marketplace then users would benefit from not having too large a learning curve. Affinity has in the main succeeded in this, but pure fundamentals of how images are meant to be displayed and are indeed expected to be displayed should be totally consistent. The fact Serif customer care are involved does show that the intended image display differs from actual image displayed and that there must be an issue which requires investigation.

With regards to DPP, it's always been slow and glitchy, it's slow on my 24 threaded machine. However, it does display images correctly and you can open a folder full of images in one go, apply a recipe, tweek a little, save, and 'Close All' without having to go through every image to close as in Affinity, goodness it's so boring I want to kill myself, Serif I hope that you are listening!

[Old Bruce]

A correct image is purely subjective.

[Muffindell]

Just now, Old Bruce said:

A correct image is purely subjective.

A correct image is one that is displayed as intended; or technically a combination of settings between aperture, shutter speed and ISO speed to produce a perfectly exposed image; or purely viewing from the point of an histogram, when nothing is blown out (highlights) or lost in shadow areas of an image: or if you get creative, points 2 and 3 don't  necessarily apply!

[Old Bruce]

1 minute ago, Muffindell said:

a perfectly exposed image

Again, purely subjective.

I didn't like the results from the professional film processors back in the day. And I don't want a piece of software applying your or anyone else's idea of perfect exposed and processed rules on my images today.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Muffindell said:

A CR2 metadata file attributes from say a canon 550D is no different from the one stored in a canon 1DX

Not necessarily true. The metadata includes model-specific info, so for example if their sensors do not have the same number of cells or the same cell sizes; or use the same number of or weighting for them in each of the camera's exposure modes or with different lenses, then the metadata can be quite different, camera model to camera model.

All this & much more metadata must be processed correctly by the RAW engine for the image to be developed. That's why there is no one "universal" CR2 developer that works for every model.

[RichardMH]

3 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

I’m personally dissatisfied with the capabilities of Develop Persona and use it only as quick and dirty way if i don’t want to fire up the more capable (quality wise) DPP, which is so slow that it hurts, but has it merits when batch processing and working with recipes.

 

I'm also unhappy with the Develop Persona. Fortunately as a Sony shooter I can use the free Capture One express for Sony which does a very good RAW conversion for Sony images. And it has a rather clever auto adjust that gives good base settings. Then send a tiff to Affinity Photo for finishing. The very fast Iridient S-Transformer is also good for Sony images but I think C1 Express is at least as good if not better. (There is an Iridient C-Transformer for Canon)

[Muffindell]

14 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Again, purely subjective.

I didn't like the results from the professional film processors back in the day. And I don't want a piece of software applying your or anyone else's idea of perfect exposed and processed rules on my images today.

Now you're applying your own individual preference against the accepted international standardisation of what is correctly exposed, which is what application software allows you to do in a post situation. However, standardisation is a given so you have repeatability across all areas of the industry.  

[Alfred]

17 hours ago, Muffindell said:

Metadata … is purely for information and has no bearing on how an image is displayed.

How so? Exif data, for example, is metadata, and the Exif ‘Orientation’ tag (which indicates the orientation of the camera relative to the captured image) tells the viewing/editing software the ‘correct’ way to display the image.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Alfred said:

How so? Exif data, for example, is metadata, and the Exif ‘Orientation’ tag (which indicates the orientation of the camera relative to the captured image) tells the viewing/editing software the ‘correct’ way to display the image.

Maybe more to the point for CR2 file processing, Canon buries lots of important camera-specific metadata in IFD#0 (the first Image File Directory) in the Makernotes section, which Canon does not publicly document because it considers it to be its proprietary intellectual property. So for example, every CR2 RAW developer has to decode a huge number of Canon tags to determine which of them are relevant to that process. Since camera-to-camera they don't even use the same index numbers for all the relevant CameraInfo tags, this has to be done individually for each model (& often for each model & lens combination) for this to produce acceptable results.

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

So for example, every CR2 RAW developer has to decode a huge number of Canon tags to determine which of them are relevant to that process.

For Affinity Photo, that should be handled in the code that Serif licensed from Canon when LibRAW was taking too long to provide CR2 support.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, Muffindell said:

However, standardisation is a given so you have repeatability across all areas of the industry.  

If you mean standardization of RAW format data like Makernotes, you could not be more wrong about that. Every camera maker uses its own proprietary standards for that, which they refuse to document publicly. It isn't even uniform camera model-to-model across all of one maker's cameras.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

For Affinity Photo, that should be handled in the code that Serif licensed from Canon when LibRAW was taking too long to provide CR2 support.

Where have you seen anything about Serif licensing anything directly from Canon? Are you maybe thinking about the in-house CR3 code Serif developed, apparently without outside help?

[walt.farrell]

36 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Where have you seen anything about Serif licensing anything directly from Canon? Are you maybe thinking about the in-house CR3 code Serif developed, apparently without outside help?

That's probably what I'm thinking of, but Serif said they got the code from Canon.

[R C-R]

Just now, walt.farrell said:

That's probably what I'm thinking of, but Serif said they got the code from Canon.

Do you have a link to a post where they said they got the code directly from Canon? I thought they did this all in-house.

[walt.farrell]

9 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Do you have a link to a post where they said they got the code directly from Canon? I thought they did this all in-house.

Sorry, no.

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

15 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Do you have a link to a post where they said they got the code directly from Canon? I thought they did this all in-house.

Sorry, no.

I asked because I (briefly!) tried searching the forums for info about that & could not find anything suggesting the code came from Canon or was developed with Canon's help. But I easily could have missed something about that because I could not think of a good search phrase that did not yield a bazillion hits.

[NotMyFault]

47 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Do you have a link to a post where they said they got the code directly from Canon? I thought they did this all in-house.

This is good and bad news. Good as the canon code should work for Cameras available at that time (until 2020), bad as it probably will not support camera models released later unless Affinity got related updates and included them in their releases. I’n doubt that this happened. Canon himself will publish updates of its own DPP when new models get released, DPP is not “future proof” without related updates.
 

Edited May 13, 2022 by NotMyFault

[Muffindell]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

If you mean standardization of RAW format data like Makernotes, you could not be more wrong about that. Every camera maker uses its own proprietary standards for that, which they refuse to document publicly. It isn't even uniform camera model-to-model across all of one maker's cameras.

You are correct, with regards to RAW data from differing manufacturers, the point of standardisation is purely for an output device where everything is in balance

[Muffindell]

We can discuss the values of metadata, file formats for hours; ultimately I would just like to load my files into Affinity and for the engine to display them correctly as intended instead of looking completely muddy and unuseable, it's not a lot to ask from what is a editing/image manipulation piece of software that is promoted to do exactly that.

 

[R C-R]

27 minutes ago, Muffindell said:

You are correct, with regards to RAW data from differing manufacturers, the point of standardisation is purely for an output device where everything is in balance

I have no idea what you mean by "in balance." There is no one output standard for this, not even when using the proprietary developing software like from Canon or Nikon. All of them have options that affect the output to raster image formats in various ways, if that is what you mean.

26 minutes ago, Muffindell said:

... ultimately I would just like to load my files into Affinity and for the engine to display them correctly as intended instead of looking completely muddy and unuseable

As has been mentioned many times, there is no one 'correct' or 'intended' way to render RAW data. For instance, that's why Affinity Photo offers options to modify basic settings like exposure or white balance, tone curves or split toning, noise reduction, & so on. If you do not like the default settings, you can change them, or if that won't get you what you want, use some other product besides AP to do that.

[Muffindell]

5 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have no idea what you mean by "in balance." There is no one output standard for this, not even when using the proprietary developing software like from Canon or Nikon. All of them have options that affect the output to raster image formats in various ways, if that is what you mean.

As has been mentioned many times, there is no one 'correct' or 'intended' way to render RAW data. For instance, that's why Affinity Photo offers options to modify basic settings like exposure or white balance, tone curves or split toning, noise reduction, & so on. If you do not like the default settings, you can change them, or if that won't get you what you want, use some other product besides AP to do that.

Yippeee! you finally got it, the default starting point is standardised across all DTP applications and is predefined by the manufacturer who created a particular file format for their products. Software, such as Affinity allows you to take that data (image) and manipulate it as you wish.

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, Muffindell said:

Yippeee! you finally got it, the default starting point is standardised across all DTP applications and is predefined by the manufacturer who created a particular file format for their products.

Nope. There is no one default starting point, much less one that has been standardized across all RAW processing apps. Likewise, there is no one standard RAW file format even from any one camera maker -- consider for example Canon's original CRW & the later CR2 & CR3 formats, & the ways different camera models encode them.

I am also not sure why you mentioned DTP apps, since few desktop publishing apps offer RAW development options.

EDIT: please refer to (among many others) this brief explanation of what a camera RAW image actually is, confirmation that it is stored in proprietary file formats, why software apps & OS's are frequently updated so they can support new formats, & so on. 

[Muffindell]

On 5/13/2022 at 7:52 PM, R C-R said:

Nope. There is no one default starting point, much less one that has been standardized across all RAW processing apps. Likewise, there is no one standard RAW file format even from any one camera maker -- consider for example Canon's original CRW & the later CR2 & CR3 formats, & the ways different camera models encode them.

I am also not sure why you mentioned DTP apps, since few desktop publishing apps offer RAW development options.

EDIT: please refer to (among many others) this brief explanation of what a camera RAW image actually is, confirmation that it is stored in proprietary file formats, why software apps & OS's are frequently updated so they can support new formats, & so on. 

You are totally wrong, try ISO/IEC 14496-12, there are standards with regards to everything including light sensitivity starting back in the 80's, prior to this ASA was common a film spec from the late 19th century plus others of the same era, every camera ever made using ISO or ASA (which covers around 140 years) uses this standard. That is what an app developer uses for baseline input/output; that is the reason if you set the exposure triangle to the same on 100 cameras of different manufacture and specification they will all produce pretty much the same image likeness regardless of what file format is used, where it is viewed or medium printed.

Yeah, I know what a RAW image is, the background development has been part of my 39 year career in cutting edge publishing and photography. What you are talking about is again standardised. RAW CR3 follows the ISO Base Media File Format (ISO/IEC 14496-12), with custom tags to give varying model functionality, but the base file in the main is the same. A CR2 file is actually a modified TIFF whereas the CR3 file is really more a CIFF, RAW is just a generic name for a sensor captured, lossless uncompressed and unprocessed file; although there are variations in what differing manufactures apply, I remember Nikon auto applying noise correction at RAW stage which had astrophotographers up in arms for a while.

DTP encompasses all apps used to produce a published product, Illustrator, Quark, InDesign, Photoshop are the most common used in the past and present; and yes I remember using the first editions of Quark as a page layout app in 1987 and Photoshop a few years later which was the start of the demise of traditional layout sheets, glue, typesetting galleys and film planning.