Affinity Photo Colors Appearing More Darker/Desaturated Than Normal

[LeoArtist16]

Whenever I use Affinity Photo, the colors always appear darker/desaturated for some reason and I don't know why it does that. No matter what I can think of to try and get the colors look more normal/saturated, nothing works. I wanted to see if this problem was because of my computer so I used Photoshop to see if I have the same color problem. However the colors there appear more bright and saturated like it should have appeared. The two picture I uploaded below show how the colors appears on both Affinity Photo and Photoshop. As you can see the colors in Affinity Photo for some reason appear more desaturated and darker while the colors in Photoshop are more brighter and saturated.  Please help me to figure out how to fix this problem of the default colors being more desaturated than normal. 

[RichardMH]

What colour settings do you have in affinity?

[walt.farrell]

CMYK (top image) vs RGB (bottom image)?

[DWright]

What colour profiles are you using as @walt.farrellmentioned a CMYK will appear different on a RGB monitor

[cajhin]

Yup, that was a PITA. Google "embedded color profile".

The color you see (on Windows) depends on what profile you installed (monitor-specific vs. generic Windows), what profile is embedded, and if the viewer software uses the profile.
If, for example, AP looks different from IrfanView, that's probably because IV ignores embedded profiles, out of the box, and AP applies it.

[LeoArtist16]

14 hours ago, RichardMH said:

What colour settings do you have in affinity?

How do I check what my color settings are? 

[LeoArtist16]

8 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

CMYK (top image) vs RGB (bottom image)?

The top image is from Affinity Photo and the bottom image is from Photoshop. As you can see there is a huge difference in color.

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, LeoArtist16 said:

How do I check what my color settings are? 

In Photo, Document > Convert Format/ICC Profile... from the menu will show it. Or, with the View Tool (the Hand) selected, it's in the Context Toolbar, e.g.,

[RichardMH]

Its also in Preferences. (In the edit menu)

[LeoArtist16]

3 minutes ago, RichardMH said:

Its also in Preferences. (In the edit menu)

Here is my color settings. I don't know what is causing the colors to appear more desaturated than normal.

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, RichardMH said:

Its also in Preferences. (In the edit menu)

Those are only defaults. The actual image color settings can/should be seen as I showed above.

[LeoArtist16]

11 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Those are only defaults. The actual image color settings can/should be seen as I showed above.

What should I change to have to more brighter colors?

[RichardMH]

If you load the brighter one into AP does it stay bright?

[LeoArtist16]

21 minutes ago, RichardMH said:

If you load the brighter one into AP does it stay bright?

What do you mean load the brighter one?

[RichardMH]

6 minutes ago, LeoArtist16 said:

What do you mean load the brighter one?

You've posted two images, one bright and one duller.

[walt.farrell]

54 minutes ago, LeoArtist16 said:

What should I change to have to more brighter colors?

Did you show us your current document's color info, as I indicated? The application defaults you showed are not relevant at this point; we need to know what your document is using.

[LeoArtist16]

19 minutes ago, RichardMH said:

You've posted two images, one bright and one duller.

Oh I see. No when I load the brighter one into Affinity Photo the colors immediately change to the desaturated colors and not the brighter ones. 

[iconoclast]

Color is a much more complex topic than most people think. In fact there are two different kinds of color mixing: the colors of light and body colors (the colors of objects). The first one is the more  important one, because without light even objects wouldn't have any color. The colors of objects are only a part of the light colors that are reflected from their surface. The  other light colors are absorbed by the surface.

As we know since Isaac Newton, the white daylight consists of light beams of all colors. The colored light beams add each other to white light. So this kind of color mixing is also called "additional color mixing". If light falls on objects, they only reflect a part of the light, depending on the characteristics of their surface. For example, if an object only reflects blue and absorbs red, yellow and other colors, it looks blue. Because in this case colors are subtracted, it is also called "subtractive color mixing".

The basic colors of additive color mixing are red, green and blue (RGB). The basic colors of subtractive color mixing are cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY). So those are also the basic colors in printing. Because you can't mix real black with cyan, magenta and yellow (in the best case only a dark grey), in printing also an additional color is used. The so called "Key color": black. So you get four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black = CMYK. The white comes from the paper you are printing on.

RGB (the light colors) has much more colors than CMYK (the body colors). Because of this, the colors of the CMYK-Colorspace are always less brilliant than the ones of RGB. So it makes a difference if you watch your images in RGB or CMYK on screen.

 

[LeoArtist16]

3 minutes ago, iconoclast said:

Color is a much more complex topic than most people think. In fact there are two different kinds of color mixing: the colors of light and body colors (the colors of objects). The first one is the more  important one, because without light even objects wouldn't have any color. The colors of objects are only a part of the light colors that are reflected from their surface. The  other light colors are absorbed by the surface.

As we know since Isaac Newton, the white daylight consists of light beams of all colors. The colored light beams add each other to white light. So this kind of color mixing is also called "additional color mixing". If light falls on objects, they only reflect a part of the light, depending on the characteristics of their surface. For example, if an object only reflects blue and absorbs red, yellow and other colors, it looks blue. Because in this case colors are subtracted, it is also called "subtractive color mixing".

The basic colors of additive color mixing are red, green and blue (RGB). The basic colors of subtractive color mixing are cyan, magenta and yellow (CMY). So those are also the basic colors in printing. Because you can't mix real black with cyan, magenta and yellow (in the best case only a dark grey), in printing also an additional color is used. The so called key color black. So you get four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black = CMYK.

RGB (the light colors) has much more colors than CMYK (the body colors). Because of this, the colors of the CMYK-Colorspace are always less brilliant than the ones of RGB. So it makes a difference if you watch your images in RGB or CMYK on screen.

 

So I am using the CMYK colors instead of the RGB colors? Is that why my colors appear darker than normal?

[walt.farrell]

11 minutes ago, LeoArtist16 said:

So I am using the CMYK colors instead of the RGB colors? Is that why my colors appear darker than normal?

Please look at the Context Toolbar when you have the image open in Affinity, and the Move Tool selected, and show us the settings for the color space and profile.

[Pšenda]

Try check ICC profile for monitor in OS.

 

[LeoArtist16]

2 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Please look at the Context Toolbar when you have the image open in Affinity, and the Move Tool selected, and show us the settings for the color space and profile.

You mean this kind of setting for the colors?

[Jimo]

46 minutes ago, LeoArtist16 said:

You mean this kind of setting for the colors?

Yep. Where it says "CMYKA/8 - US Web Coated (SWOP) v2", that means you are using a CMYK colour profile in Affinity Photo. Your image file is in RGB, but it's getting converted to the CMYK colour space of your document when you import it. It looks 'duller' because CMYK has a more limited colour spectrum and can't reproduce all of the RGB tones.

If you're just designing work to be seen on a screen, you can convert your document to RGB to keep that vibrancy by going to:

Document > Convert format / ICC Profile..

Select an RGB format and RGB profile and then click on 'convert'.

It might be wise to re-import your image file after you've done that (although I think Affinity stores the original RGB data - but definitely reimport if you previously rasterised it, as you can't get back what was lost in the initial RGB to CMYK conversion).

Alternatively, when you create a new document, you can set the colour format and profile under the 'Colour' tab in the right-hand column of the New Document window.

However, if you're designing something to send for printing, you might want to work in CMYK anyway and accept that you can't have those brighter RGB tones. 

 

[LeoArtist16]

16 minutes ago, Jimo said:

Yep. Where it says "CMYKA/8 - US Web Coated (SWOP) v2", that means you are using a CMYK colour profile in Affinity Photo. Your image file is in RGB, but it's getting converted to the CMYK colour space of your document when you import it. It looks 'duller' because CMYK has a more limited colour spectrum and can't reproduce all of the RGB tones.

If you're just designing work to be seen on a screen, you can convert your document to RGB to keep that vibrancy by going to:

Document > Convert format / ICC Profile..

Select an RGB format and RGB profile and then click on 'convert'.

It might be wise to re-import your image file after you've done that (although I think Affinity stores the original RGB data - but definitely reimport if you previously rasterised it, as you can't get back what was lost in the initial RGB to CMYK conversion).

Alternatively, when you create a new document, you can set the colour format and profile under the 'Colour' tab in the right-hand column of the New Document window.

However, if you're designing something to send for printing, you might want to work in CMYK anyway and accept that you can't have those brighter RGB tones. 

 

Thank You, this fixed my problem. Now the colors appear brighter than before.