Affinity 2 Does Not Display Colors Correctly When Windows Display Uses Custom ICC Profile

[invertedforest]

When I create an image in Affinity Designer 2 on my color-calibrated display and export it with the document sRGB profile embedded, the colors in the exported document look different from the colors in the Affinity Designer 2 document.

I'm using Affinity Designer 2.0.4

Reproduction Steps:

1. In the Color Management settings of the Windows machine, set the display to use a custom color profile (my profile is DCIP3-NT2RR_156WF6_20230427.icm). On windows, color profiles are stored at C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color
2. Create a a new document using RGB/8 color format and sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color profile.
3. Create a square with a colored fill (the document I used is color_demo.afdesign)
4. Export document as JPEG using File > Export menu item. Set the ICC profile to "Use document profile" and check "embed ICC profiles". (the file I exported is called color_demo_export.jpg)
5. Compare the color displayed in the export with the color displayed in the editor. They should be slightly different. I took a screenshot of what the comparison looks like on my machine (color_comparison_screenshot.jpg)

DCIP3-NT2RR_156WF6_20230427.icm color_demo.afdesign

[NotMyFault]

To my knowledge MS Paint does not support color profiles, and produces wrong renderings (simply output the raw color values without color profile correction). If you want to check the rendering of images with color profiles different than sRGB, you can use any current web browser like edge, firefox, chrome which are capable to correctly interpret color profiles.

 

This all assumes that your full chain of color profile configuration is correct. Normally you never assign a device specific color profile to images / documents in Photo (with a few really rare exceptions). These profiles are only used within Windows for the display or output device. Documents stay in one of the base profiles like sRGB, AdobeRGB, Display-P3 etc. Using it this way keeps the documents "portable", meaning they can be correctly displayed on any display.  Not relevant here, I misread you OP and assumed you embedded the device profile.

 

 

https://affinityspotlight.com/article/display-colour-management-in-the-affinity-apps/

[Hangman]

Hi @invertedforest and welcome to the forums,

I believe the issue here is that you are comparing colour between two different colour gamuts. DCI-P3 has a colour gamut around 25% wider than sRGB so when you colour is exported using the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color profile your colour is being translated from one device's space to another which would account for the difference you are seeing when comparing the two.

Different rendering intents may have an influence over how the colour is translated...

[invertedforest]

I assumed that using sRGB as the working color space in my document and also as the color space on export would provide consistency between what I see in Affinity and what I see in the export. My understanding is that there shouldn’t be any sort of conversion because the color space never changes—it’s sRGB all the way through. Is there a step I’m missing, or a way to make Designer display an accurate preview of what my document would look like on export?

[NotMyFault]

It is Paint showing the wrong colors, not Designer.

[invertedforest]

Ah okay, that makes sense.

I did some more investigation to figure out which image viewers worked and which ones didn't, and it seems like this is actually a problem with how image viewers interact with ICC profiles on windows. Every single image viewer worked when I turned off my screen calibration, even if I did not embed the color profile, but some of them started showing incorrect colors when I turned it on. I made a big table with all of my findings (attached), but here's a quick summary:

Applications That Work Out of Box (meaning you can just open an image in them and it will look right)

Affinity Designer 2

Microsoft Photos

Firefox (but only if you embed the color profile in the image)

 

Applications That Need To Be Configured

Krita: Krita doesn’t respect the Windows configuration settings for color management. You have to go into the Display tab of the color section of your preferences and set your display profiles there manually.

XnView: Go to settings > General > ICC and enable ICC profiles

 

Applications That Don’t Work

DJV: As far as I can tell DJV just doesn’t display colors properly on a calibrated display and there’s no setting to fix it

 

Looks like I need to start viewing images in XnView instead of MSPaint, haha. Is there a way to mark this issue as closed?

 

ColorSpaceData.pdf