I can't develop close to my camera's jpg quality using raw in Affinity Photo!

[eobet]

Left is jpg out of the camera, right is a developed raw in Affinity Photo:

Look at how blown the highlights are in the raw and how crunchy the color transitions are.

I see a lot of people asking about whitepoint, and the answer is to use exposure and levels, but I can't get it to work.

Why can't I get close to the jpg quality using raw?

I fired up Photoshop CS6 and the difference with just dragging the whitepoint is remarkable, but then again, the colors in everything else are quite atrocious, haha:

[DWright]

Is it possible for you to send us a copy of your RAW file using the Dropbox link below and are you using the Mac, Windows or iPad version of Photo

https://www.dropbox.com/request/6uZq3gfkff3fX5I1iaG4

[v_kyr]

What cam and RAW format at all?

[eobet]

Ok, I uploaded it. It's a DNG from a Leica TL2 and I used the Windows version of Affinity Photo (from the Microsoft Store).

[v_kyr]

Well as far as I've seen from test sites the TL2 JPGs are known to be pretty bad in contrast to it's DNG RAWs, further I wouldn't urge on that bad keyb lighting shot here anyway! - You better look and compare some other more common shots here!

[eobet]

The only thing I'm interested in is how to retrieve the lost information in the blown highlights of the RAW file in Affinity Photo without darkening the rest of the picture.

[Ron P.]

35 minutes ago, eobet said:

The only thing I'm interested in is how to retrieve the lost information in the blown highlights

What I learned through years of studying photography, and retouching, you can recover information from shadow areas not from blown highlights. Most all detail is completely lost in highlights that are blown out. That's why photographers that know what they're doing, understand exposure. When metering a shot, you ETTR (Expose to the Right) of your camera's meter. Expose for the Highlights, and let the shadows fall where they may.  I don't care what editing software you use, there's no recovering data in that area.

You can recover highlight information so long as it's not blown. In Affinity Photo, Develop persona, you need to work with the Brightness, Highlights, Blackpoint. For highlights that might be blown, drop the Highlights to -100%. If you start getting some detail, start working with the Blackpoint, maybe pull down exposure and/or Brighness. It's a dance between those settings, back and forth. It's the same dance in about all such programs. I learned this early on with LR.

There's the Tone Curve, and Overlays you can explore. If you start getting somewhere, press Develop, take it into the Photo Persona, and start tweaking it more. There's a lot of control in the Photo Persona, that's non-destructive. Affinity Photo's develop personal needs a lot of work. It's not comparable to PS (Camera Raw) or LR, or several others that have years of development on Serif. But it can work if there's something to work with, AND you're willing to take the time to really learn it.