Why Does AF Automatically Change the Appearance of My Photos?

[JC422]

Hello,

I'm a wildlife photographer and am still rather new to Affinity Photo/photo editing software in general. I have version 1.10.6.

I shoot in RAW and basically want to edit my pictures as little as possible to maintain scientifically accurate documentations of my subjects. I do not wish to get artsy with my images and really only need the software for lens corrections, chromatic aberration reduction, and exposure control. The problem I have ran into involves affinity photo pre-altering the appearance of my images as soon as they're opened. 

Here is an example.

This is what one of my images looks like straight from the camera.

This is what the same image looks like when opened in Affinity Photo.

As you can see, the exposure, color, etc. of my images drastically change when opened in Affinity Photo. Any ideas why this could be happening? I have all options turned off in develop assistant as I found that they were still altering the true appearance of my images when they were turned on. 

I would love to work with my actual images and not pre-altered renditions of them, but I'm honestly stumped with how to do that. Thanks in advance for any help!

Edited May 24, 2023 by JC422

[wim]

Goedemorgen jc422,

Een raw foto moet nog ontwikkeld worden naar jpeg. De camera laat denk ik een jpeg zien. Kijk je ook naar het histogram?

Wim

[Hangman]

Hi @JC422 and welcome to the forums,

RAW files are unprocessed and un-compressed data files that contain all of the “image information” available to the camera sensor. Because RAW files are unprocessed, they come out looking flat and dark which is what you are seeing when opening your files in Affinity Photo, this is how they should look.

The image you're seeing straight from camera is a JPEG preview which has been processed in camera. The camera will process the image to add blacks, contrast, brightness, noise reduction, sharpening and so on and then render the file to a compressed JPEG which is what you are likely seeing in the first image.

Depending on your needs you may be better shooting both RAW and JPEG (if you can't extract a JPEG directly from the RAW file), e.g., if you have two card slots in your camera you can set one to record RAW the second to JPEG and then see if the JPEG gives you what you need without having to process the RAW file.