Whole image flickers on M2 Macbook Air

[adoyle]

On my M2 Macbook Air [macOS 12.6 (21G115), 24GB RAM], I get flickering on Affinity Photo 1.10.5 as seen. Anytime the mouse focus changes or some other screen event happens, the image flickers to a washed-out look, then comes back to normal. This does not happen with Affinity Designer 1.10.5 on the same setup.

I rebooted the system to no avail. I also tried using the built-in screen on the Macbook but the same thing happens.

Here's a video of the effect: 

 

[adoyle]

The fix is to not set Display: Metal in the AP Preferences Performance panel. Software, OpenGL (Basic) and OpenGL all work fine.

Edited October 22, 2022 by adoyle

[NotMyFault]

It might be helpful to mention that:

As a workaround, some users have found that disabling Automatically Adjust Brightness under Apple > System Preferences > Displays reduces these delays.

Could be required even after updating the OS.

Disabling Metal maybe overkill in this situation, removing all the (performance-) joy from using Photo.

[adoyle]

Thanks NotMyFault. I already had the auto brightness off. Also, only the image panel is experiencing the flashes, none of the rest of the panels are affected. That seems more like an issue with the image when the panel gets updated.

I'm curious if there are any M2 Macbook Air users who are or are not having this problem.

[adoyle]

Well, this is getting a little weird! From what I can tell, the flickering only happens on photos that were exported from the Apple Photos desktop app (I haven't tried exporting from the iOS Photos app). If I export a photo to the file system, then open with AP, the flickering happens. If I choose to export it as an unmodified original and then open with AP, there is no flickering.

So far I've only been dealing with JPEG photos. If I then open one of the "bad" photos in AP and export it to TIFF, then open that TIFF in AP, it flickers. This suggests that there's some kind of metadata cause to the instability. Sure enough, if I use exiftool (https://exiftool.org) and strip all the metadata like this

exiftool -all:all= IMG_3025.jpeg -o IMG_3025-noexif.jpeg

and open it, there's no flickering.

Maybe it's related to the color profile. The photos that flicker all have Color Profile: Apple Wide Color Sharing Profile

Edited October 23, 2022 by adoyle

[adoyle]

See also :

 

[Cbestopher]

I have a new Mac M2 Studio Ultra with the new Apple monitor and a fresh OS Load Ventura 13.4.1

and have been having this issue also (used the defaults as I recall) 

After turning off Enable Metal compute acceleration and setting to openGL and checking the Use only integrated GPU (I have no external GPU)

the affinity image flickering seems to have stopped; My symptoms are the same as the video the other user included above with the washed out flashing edited image when the mouse or other events (like using the program) occurred. Not much good having a high powered machine if I have to reduce the assets it can use. 

Just FYI This is affinity photo 2 2.1.1

 

 

 

[adoyle]

Hi Cbestopher

You can turn Metal back on, I have found that this flicker only happens if your image color profile is Apple Wide Color Sharing Profile. If so, just change profiles and the flicker stops. 

[Cbestopher]

Thank you; Its kind of a annoyance to have to change or reassign the color profile each time I load/edit a photo with this meta data but at least this is an explanation and work around; thank you very much!

[ChromagraphS3300]

I have the same problem, images with different profiles (sRGB/epson scanner) on Mac Studio 2023 M2Max.
Flickering images, the software is unusable.

Switching off Metal acceleration is really a bad option.

[MikeTO]

10 hours ago, ChromagraphS3300 said:

I have the same problem, images with different profiles (sRGB/epson scanner) on Mac Studio 2023 M2Max.
Flickering images, the software is unusable.

Switching off Metal acceleration is really a bad option.

Hi and welcome to the forums. Have you tried changing the image colour's profile from Apple Wide Color Sharing Profile to a different profile?

[ChromagraphS3300]

It is not Apple Wide Color but a Epson Perfection 3490 Scanner profile and I want to keep the images in that color space.Epson_Perfection_3490_Transp_22082008.icc

[NotMyFault]

It is best practice to use a standard (device independent) color profile for documents. I would do a one-time conversion from the scanner profile to a generic wide-gamut profile. Stay with 16 bit depth as long as possible (e.g. until exporting to 8-bit jpg). 

The benefits of this approach:

• you don't need to embed color profiles, which can save several KB to MB per image.
• All modern browser on all current OS (Windows 10/11, Android, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS) are capable to correctly render these files, respecting the color profile
• Using e.g display DCI-P3 is now the least common denominator across almost all devices, achieving far more gamut vs. sRGB.

[v_kyr]

On 9/24/2023 at 7:53 PM, NotMyFault said:

Using e.g display DCI-P3 is now the least common denominator across almost all devices, achieving far more gamut vs. sRGB.

Not really, as still not every device display supports the full DCI-P3 gamut and some displays (even better 4k HDR capable displays) do only support a fraction of it (90-95%), so not the full spectrum. Usually DCI-P3 covers the majority of all natural surface colors and has a ~26% larger gamut compared to sRGB (this means: DCI-P3 provides 26 percent more colors than sRGB).

So certain vibrant DCI-P3 colors, which are outside the sRGB gamut, will then be instead displayed less vibrant on sRGB devices.

• sRGB and DCI-P3 color profiles

[loukash]

On 9/24/2023 at 7:06 PM, ChromagraphS3300 said:

It is not Apple Wide Color but a Epson Perfection 3490 Scanner profile

I smell a pattern here (emphasis mine), see my own report on the same issue: 

[ChromagraphS3300]

On 9/24/2023 at 7:53 PM, NotMyFault said:

• you don't need to embed color profiles, which can save several KB to MB per image.
• All modern browser on all current OS (Windows 10/11, Android, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS) are capable to correctly render these files, respecting the color profile
• Using e.g display DCI-P3 is now the least common denominator across almost all devices, achieving far more gamut vs. sRGB.

I‘m working with hires files of scanned slides. I know I can assign a different profile, but at this state of work I don‘t want to.

if it works in Photoshop it should also work in Affinity Photo.

Also I don‘t want a workaround but a working application.

[NotMyFault]

1 minute ago, ChromagraphS3300 said:

if it works in Photoshop it should also work in Affinity Photo.

While agree from a user standpoint that this is desirable, it is not the case in some cases.

There are several PS functions not available in Affinity, and others can only be use with totally different workflow (e.g. channels panel, copy/paste, focus on non-destructive workflows)

Wrt color profiles, Photo does not support Camera Profiles (X-rite).

I don’t want to start another PS/AF discussion, I’m just explaining the best practices while using Affinity products - specifically for cases where user expectations are not met. You are free to consume this information, or stay on your point of view. Other forum users who find this thread via search might find my post helpful (or yours).

[cajhin]

This seems to be an old unresolved problem, Metal graphics cannot handle some color profiles?

I have an issue with iPhone13+Macbook air M2, and I don't reeeally understand color spaces.

What would be the correct/best way to deal with iPhone 13 images? They open in Affinity as 'Color Space: Uncalibrated', and show the known problem when I set 'Display: Metal'

Manually changing the color space to sRGB fixes the issue, but a) annoying to do it every time and b) don't know if this impacts the image quality.

[Affinity Info Bot]

The issue "M2 Mac flashing workspace - when using Apple Wide Colour Gamut" (REF: AF-473) has been fixed by the developers in internal build "2.3.0.2150".
This fix should soon be available as a customer beta and is planned for inclusion in the next customer release.
Customer beta builds are announced here and you can participate by following these instructions.
If you still experience this problem once you are using that build version (or later) please reply to this thread including @Serif Info Bot to notify us.

[BertD]

On 10/22/2022 at 9:05 PM, adoyle said:

The fix is to not set Display: Metal in the AP Preferences Performance panel. Software, OpenGL (Basic) and OpenGL all work fine.

Just got a Mac Studio M2 Max and have this issue also. Changing this setting indeed seems to solve the problem.

 

 

[adoyle]

2 hours ago, BertD said:

Just got a Mac Studio M2 Max and have this issue also. Changing this setting indeed seems to solve the problem.

 

 

As others have pointed out, switching off Metal is overkill. The problem is related to unsupported color profiles - see this topic 

 

[BertD]

On 12/28/2023 at 8:35 PM, adoyle said:

As others have pointed out, switching off Metal is overkill. The problem is related to unsupported color profiles - see this topic 

 

I use a colour profile specifically for my printer/paper (Epson P900 with Permajet paper profile). Does seem to be a new issue though as I never experienced it on my old 2016 MacBook Pro.