Issues with RAW images in Affinity Photo 2: Clipped highlights not displaying properly and the overall photo looks very dark

[James Zhan]

Hi! I'm new to Affinity Photo 2 (coming from Photoshop and Lightroom) so I apologize if I'm asking silly questions, but I did do a search and couldn't find the answer.

I opened a RAW image taken with my Sony A7III (AdobeRGB) in AP2 and immediately, the image looks different than what I'm used to in Photoshop and Lightroom. In particular, the clipped highlights on the floor lamp on the right looks blotchy and the color is definitely incorrect. The overall image also looks very dark.

Below, you can see a comparison between AP2 (left) and Photoshop (right):

 

The photo on the right was how the scene looked on the back of the camera and in real life. Note that the photo was properly exposed, according to the exposure meter on the camera. However, the same photo looks very under-exposed when opened in AP2. If I raise the exposure in AP2 to match Photoshop, the clipped highlights on the floor light on the right would have a very saturated magenta tint to them:

I tried changing the "RAW output format" and "RAW engine" in Develop Assistant, and the "RGB Color Profile" and "32bit RGB Color Profile" in Settings, but nothing fixed the clipped highlight issue.

I understand that different apps have different approaches to things, but I'm trying to just edit a RAW image here and I could not figure out how to get AP2 to properly display the image.

Any help would be highly appreciated!

[lepr]

1 hour ago, James Zhan said:

Any help would be highly appreciated!

Welcome to the Affinity forums.

You are seeing a known problem with Affinity's developing of intensely blue-lit regions in raw files.

Save yourself a heap of grief and use Capture One to develop your raw files to images that can be further edited in Affinity.

Capture One Express For Sony is free. It has the same highly regarded develop engine as Capture One Pro.

https://www.captureone.com/en/account/download/capture-one-express-for-sony

 

[James Zhan]

29 minutes ago, lepr said:

Welcome to the Affinity forums.

You are seeing a known problem with Affinity's developing of intensely blue-lit regions in raw files.

Save yourself a heap of grief and use Capture One to develop your raw files to images that can be further edited in Affinity.

 

Thanks for the info! That's unfortunate to hear. I've heard great things about Affinity apps so it's really bizarre to me that Affinity hasn't gotten this ironed out. Is this a bug that Affinity is going to fix?

I have used Capture One before but I think I will stick with Photoshop and Lightroom for now. I was just hoping to replace Photoshop with Affinity Photo for any one-off RAW edits.

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, James Zhan said:

Is this a bug that Affinity is going to fix?

Likely. Do you mean there are bugs that Serif announces not to plan to fix them?

The blue clipping issue was discussed recently here …

… and before in this thread, above and below this hint to set Tone Curve to Take No action …

The forum has reports that some image capture information contained in RAW metadata is ignored when opened in Affinity, but taken into account when opened in the camera brand's software. This may be inconvenient but a way to do initial development … and then continue in Affinity.

[James Zhan]

17 hours ago, thomaso said:

Likely. Do you mean there are bugs that Serif announces not to plan to fix them?

Haha no, I mean more like if Serif has acknowledged it at the very least and expressed somewhere, on their social media or the forums here, that they are working on a fix. I'm new to Affinity and I don't know how much the devs interact with the users.

I have already set the tone curve to "take no action" and tried setting the output to 16 bit. Nothing fixed the issue for me.

[walt.farrell]

40 minutes ago, James Zhan said:

no, I mean more like if Serif has acknowledged it at the very least and expressed somewhere, on their social media or the forums here, that they are working on a fix. I'm new to Affinity and I don't know how much the devs interact with the users.

QA or Support monitor the forums, and when they agree that a user has found a problem that should be categorized as a bug, they create a bug report and tag the form topic with the bug-id. 

Then it's in the Developers' hands. They will analyze further, and prioritize the problem, and at some time, possibly, provide a fix in a new release.

There will generally be no communication during this time, and there's no way to determine when a fix may be delivered. Depending on the priority they assign, and the difficulty of the fix, and the interaction with other development work, it could happen quickly or it might take years.

 

 

[Archiman]

I have the exact same problem, and thinking of not buying the v2 version just for that.