Support for B&W-preferred workflow

[tfb]

I have a Sigma dp2 Quattro, and I'm experimenting with Affinity Photo as an alternative to my current Sigma Photo Pro -> TIFF -> Pixelmator workflow, mostly because SPP is both very slow and not Apple M1 native.

One thing that the dp2 can do (and why I bought it in fact) is make B&W-preferred raw files.  As far as I can tell these are just colour raw files but they have a flag set that says 'this is meant to be B&W'.  SPP then knows about this and shows you the file in B&W unless you go out of your way to see it in colour.  This workflow is important to me as a mostly-B&W-film person: once I've seen an image in colour I find it very difficult to then see it again properly in B&W, and what the dp2Q & SPP let me do is never see the image in colour.

If I look at B&W-preferred X3Fs in Affinity Photo they appear in colour by default.  Is there a way of saying to it that 'if the B&W flag is set in the raw file, do not show colour unless you are told to do so'?

Thank you, and sorry if this is a FAQ: I did look and could not find it.

[Lee D]

Hi @tfb Welcome to the forums.

This has previously discussed and the way our RAW engine is designed will always open the file as colour despite the B/W tag being present in the metadata. This does allow you to do the conversion in Develop to fine tune the image instead of relying on the default profile.

[tfb]

@Lee D Thank you.  From my perspective it would be really nice to add an option so that you could say 'initially show this in B&W' as that workflow is important to me.  However I realise I'm probably in a small minority as someone who has more-or-less only ever worked with B&W.

[Ron P.]

This would be the same as reading Canon's Camera Profiles for their digital cameras, which Affinity Photo does not. There is a Feature Request and Suggestion forum. You can search to see if someone has already made such a feature request, and if so, add your vote for that. If not then add your request to the forum.