Ugly color shifts in RAW highlights

[Thane5]

Hi, 

I wanted to edit this raw photo (See attachement) in Affinity Photo, when i noticed that these clouds looked quite ugly. Their highlight falloff is steep and the colours shift towards orange. I tried various adjustments in the "Develop" persona (Exposure, highlights/shadows, tone curves), but i did not manage to get rid of it.

Because i wanted to make sure it was not an issue with the raw file itself, i opened in two other tools, Lightroom Classic and Canon's free, in-house raw developer, Digital Photo professional 4.

  

The two other tools handle this case visibly better.

Why is that? And how can i get the same results in Affinity Photo?

IMG_0426.CR3

[NotMyFault]

4 hours ago, Thane5 said:

Why is that? And how can i get the same results in Affinity Photo?

RAW files need to be interpreted and transformed to create an image that on display has best similarity to what the human eye would seen in the camera position. Camera vendors do not disclose all their secret sauce, so competing apps need to guess on their own or pay to license the secret sauce. Affinity apps depend on LibRAW, a free and open software which naturally lacks behind Canon‘s own app which you already paid for by buying Canon camera.

The best way to deal with this is to use Canon DPP or any RAW developer you prefer for critical files. Then export as tiff/16 and continue to do all creative work in Affinity apps 

Backround about RAW editing

 

[Thane5]

Ah, good to know. This is definitely annoying, especially now that i'm starting to see it everywhere... 

I also compared the same file using Darktable, which to my understanding, also uses LibRaw. Surprisingly, the clouds looked perfectly fine in Darktable by default. However in the "History" panel i saw that its automatic adjustments applied the "Filmic RGB" Module. When disabling that, the clouds suddenly look near identical to Affinity Photo again.

So it seems there is an open source solution to this problem available, it is just missing from Affinity Photo.

Maybe AGX can be that solution? From my understanding it is a similar colour-space transform thingy like "Filmic", except newer and better. In fact, Darktable is also currently working on an AGX implementation for their next update.