Images in RAW Persona seem "off"

[J. Web]

Hello, I'm a new user of Affinity and ran into something rather odd during some work that I was doing. I was looking at a (poor) image I took of a cardinal and noticed that the coloring look very different than what I was expecting. I opened the same file in NX Studio (the file is .nef) and it seemed like it was also a bit odd but still closer to what I was expecting overall. I know that RAW files can be interpreted differently by different software but this is a rather extreme difference IMO and I wanted to know what might be the cause of this. I've attached the original image as well as a side by side comparison of the image in both programs. I'm going to keep researching buy any input would be greatly appreciated!

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forums

What I'm seeing is NX Studio seems to apply Noise Reduction and a lot of sharpening/blurring. AP Develop Persona presents you with the RAW file as it was captured by your camera, Unless in the Develop Assistant you've enabled Apply Tone Curve, Exposure Bias, Noise Reduction for both Luminance & Color. It allows you more control over the development of your RAW files. I think Serif still has a lot of work to do for their RAW file development. Most of the camera manufacturer's software will, and should do a much better job of this, because they're engineered by them for their specific products.

Any camera tonal settings such as Landscape, Camera Standard, Camera Faithful, ect, (I shoot Canon cameras, so not familiar with Nikon's), are not interpreted by AP, so would cause the images to appear differently than what you may expect.

[J. Web]

4 hours ago, Ron P. said:

Welcome to the forums

What I'm seeing is NX Studio seems to apply Noise Reduction and a lot of sharpening/blurring. AP Develop Persona presents you with the RAW file as it was captured by your camera, Unless in the Develop Assistant you've enabled Apply Tone Curve, Exposure Bias, Noise Reduction for both Luminance & Color. It allows you more control over the development of your RAW files. I think Serif still has a lot of work to do for their RAW file development. Most of the camera manufacturer's software will, and should do a much better job of this, because they're engineered by them for their specific products.

Any camera tonal settings such as Landscape, Camera Standard, Camera Faithful, ect, (I shoot Canon cameras, so not familiar with Nikon's), are not interpreted by AP, so would cause the images to appear differently than what you may expect.

Thanks for the quick reply. What you're saying makes a great deal of sense. I've been tinkering with the settings in both since I posted and I noticed that noise reduction was going on in Nikon NX and once I enabled it in Affinity and tinkered with the settings (aka... maxed out luminance), the image in Affinity look very similar. What I might need to start looking into is how to force NX to not apply its own settings because this threw me off quite a bit.

One quick question if you don't mind. Does Windows' own codecs also do this? I noticed that the same image looked very similar to how it did in NX when pulled up in the OS' own photo viewer application too.

Edited April 24, 2023 by J. Web

[Ron P.]

What you are probably seeing in Windows Viewer is a JPEG not the actual RAW file. The JPEG file will be developed according to your camera settings, and are included for viewing instantly, on the view screen of cameras, web browsers, and OS apps like Windows Viewer.

[RichardMH]

I note Affinity Photo thinks your image is sRGB. Might want to change to a larger colour space. ROMM RGB is good. Suspect NX Studio is at least Adobe RGB.

[J. Web]

On 4/23/2023 at 5:12 PM, Ron P. said:

What you are probably seeing in Windows Viewer is a JPEG not the actual RAW file. The JPEG file will be developed according to your camera settings, and are included for viewing instantly, on the view screen of cameras, web browsers, and OS apps like Windows Viewer.

This is true. I'm still not 100% sure why but Windows Photo insists on showing an altered version of the .NEF file. I've mostly grown to accept it while I look for an alternative but most third party viewers that I've seen seem to have the same issue.

[J. Web]

On 4/23/2023 at 7:32 PM, RichardMH said:

I note Affinity Photo thinks your image is sRGB. Might want to change to a larger colour space. ROMM RGB is good. Suspect NX Studio is at least Adobe RGB.

I made the adjustment and it did help with the color a bit. It didn't solve the actual issue but it was nice to know about all the same. Thanks!

[RichardMH]

Do you have a wide gamut monitor? Windows is all over the place with them.

[J. Web]

@RichardMH The monitors themselves cover 95% of the DCI-P3 gamut and I'm not sure about Adobe RGB. I have my default settings for Affinity photo set to the P3 gamut now. They claim to support HDR 400 but I'm somewhat skeptical of that.