Some (not all) of my photos look desaturated when exporting

[AprilJulynn]

Hi. I am fairly new to Affinity Photo and I am using it to quickly edit some photos for a photoshoot with a friend. I went to export a few of the photos, and the first one exported correctly with no issues. The second, third, and fourth photos I tried to export were desaturated. They look desaturated in the export preview page. At the time, I had not messed with any color profile settings and am assuming everything was default as this was my first project working with Affinity Photo (in several years. I had V1 years ago). 

Also, I am using it on a Mac

I tried to read some other topics with similar questions and have yet to fix the problem. Most of it is very unfamiliar to me so please bear with my explanations.

 

Under my Preferences for Affinity Photo the RGB and 32bit RGB Color Profiles are set to sRGB.

If I go to Document -> Assign ICC Profile... and assign the sRGB profile, the color desaturates in my workspace. This happens for both the "good" and "bad" files. (Good being the file that exports correctly. Bad being the one that exports desaturated).

If I go to Document -> Convert Format/ICC Profile and select sRGB, the "good" file changes color only slightly, and the "bad" file desaturates.

 

I have gone back through all of the files I have edited so far at random. Some export normally and the majority desaturate. I cannot figure out any difference between the files! Can someone please help? I am at my wits end and trying to turn these around quickly.

 

I have attached one of the "good" photos and one if the "bad" photos below.

 

Thank you,

April

 

 

bad.afphoto good.afphoto

[lepr]

Hi and welcome to the Affinity forums.

I don't know what has corrupted the 'bad' AdobeRGB document, but, for example, the 'Background' layer desaturates if it is simply re-rasterised, taking on the very same appearance as if its pixel values were in sRGB colour space instead of the document's AdobeRGB colour space.

A solution:

1. open the 'bad' AdobeRGB document - it appears well saturated
2. convert to sRGB - it appears desaturated as if sRGB were assigned instead of a conversion to sRGB
3. assign AdobeRGB - it regains the well saturated appearance and the document now will behave correctly

Note that the document has a Snapshot you should delete since it contains the badly behaved 'Background' and is redundant anyway.

[AprilJulynn]

@lepr Thank you for the solution! It worked to fix the problem, though it is tedious.

 

I just edited over 100 photos, saving and exporting as I went with no issues. However, after I finished I went back to tweak some of the images, and after re-opening them, changing one or two things, and then trying to export again, I encountered the same desaturating issue. I was able to use your fix but this is driving me nuts.

 

I will have to learn what snapshots are so I can delete it. 

[lepr]

2 hours ago, AprilJulynn said:

@lepr Thank you for the solution! It worked to fix the problem, though it is tedious.

 

I just edited over 100 photos, saving and exporting as I went with no issues. However, after I finished I went back to tweak some of the images, and after re-opening them, changing one or two things, and then trying to export again, I encountered the same desaturating issue. I was able to use your fix but this is driving me nuts.

 

I will have to learn what snapshots are so I can delete it. 

 

Glad to have helped in some way

I've not been able to provoke the problem you are having, so I don't know what might prevent it occurring to your documents. Hopefully, Serif will be able to take a look at some of your problematic documents to discover what's happening.

A Snapshot is a record of the state of your document at a particular time. One is created automatically when you first open an image file such as a PNG or JPG, or develop a RAW file. The Snapshots panel can be found in the Window menu if it isn't already in the app's Studio. (View > Studio menu of v1)