Grays have reddish hue

[Yaisog]

Hi,

this thing has been driving me crazy, but I couldn't find anything helpful via search.

When using Designer 2, all colors from the "Grays" swatches or selected via other methods have a reddish hue on screen that I cannot get rid of. It's most obvious with grays. Exporting to e.g. PDF they go back to being neutral gray when viewing the PDF in a third-party viewer.

It's most clearly illustrated by this screenshot:

In my opinion, these colors on screen should look the same. It also shows that it's not a mis-calibrated monitor or other Windows color management problem, since internally for Windows, the GPU and the monitor, the color of these two boxes should be identical, but they are not: The PowerToys color picker identifies the left as (192, 192, 192) and the right as (188, 178, 175).

Changing a different Document Color Format (RGB, Gray, CMYK) has not effect. Neither does changing the Document Color Profile.
My monitors are being calibrated using a Calibrite colorchecker.
I do not notice similar behavior in other non-Affinity applications. As far as I can tell, this did not happen in Designer 1.

Does anyone have any helpful hints?

Yaisog

hue.afdesign

Edited November 1, 2023 by Yaisog

[carl123]

2 hours ago, Yaisog said:

Does anyone have any helpful hints?

I can't reproduce this to the extent you are seeing a difference

Can you upload the Designer 2 document from which you produced the above screenshot?

 

[stokerg]

Hi @Yaisog,

I also can't replicate this, so if you could attach the afdesign file that would be great  

[Pšenda]

This is how it looks for me.

 

5 hours ago, Yaisog said:

I do not notice similar behavior in other non-Affinity applications.

It is known that unlike other applications, Affinity uses ICC profiles for desktop display. Do you have the correct ICC profile for the monitor in the OS?

[Yaisog]

I have uploaded the Designer 2 file to the original post.

Yaisog

[Pšenda]

20 minutes ago, Yaisog said:

I have uploaded the Designer 2 file

For me

[Yaisog]

In case it matters, I have a Radeon RX 6650 XT with current AMD drivers on Windows 11. I have set everything to off in the AMD control panel that has to do with color.

I have disabled any Windows ICC profiles under Color Management and I also turned off DisplayCAL. Nothing helped.

What confuses me is that the source color of the fill - before any modification by ICC profiles or look-up tables or whatnot - should be identical in both cases. So any color corrections should act on them the same. Then how can they be different?

I am sure this is not something everyone is expeciencing and there must be something special in my setup. Otherwise I would have seen other posts complaining about this.

[lepr]

40 minutes ago, Yaisog said:

I have uploaded the Designer 2 file to the original post.

The right hand rectangle in the current document is RGB(179, 179, 179), which is 30% black, not 25%. That doesn't explain the red tint on your machine, of course.

 

[Yaisog]

I think I have figured this out, maybe. @Pšenda might have been onto something. Instead of removing all color profiles from Windows color management I set the monitor to the sRGB profile instead of the one generated with DisplayCAL. After that it now seems to work, both squares look gray.

What I think happened is that my monitor has hardware calibration (ViewSonic VP2768a), so the corrections are "baked into" the hardware. Until now I thought that the ICC profile that DisplayCAL saves is just the minute remaining corrections that remain after hardware calibration, but it seems that it is actually the full calibration that now gets applied twice if a program actually uses that profile for software calibration. Setting the windows profile to sRGB skips one of these steps.

I will have to do another color check to see if the colors I get now are correct, but at least the hue is gone.

Yaisog