Affinity Photo Corrupting Parts of Files on Import

[Syberkonda]

This has been an issue since at least July. When importing photos into Affinity for editing, it adds this strange corruption that you can see on the right edge of the attached image.

 

The worst part is that this also causes the image files themselves to have these lines introduced. Sometimes the line corruption is so bad that it completely ruins images forever. I have lost some of my favorite photos to this bug, which desperately needs fixing. If I can't resolve this, I will have no choice but to switch to another RAW processor because I can't afford to keep losing images to this kind of corruption.

Edited February 4 by Syberkonda

[Old Bruce]

I don't see anything resembling corruption on the right edge, or anywhere else. 

Ah, now I see it.

42 minutes ago, Syberkonda said:

... When importing photos into Affinity for editing, ...

Importing how? What sort of photos? Are these raw files? Affinity Photo (most likely) or Designer or Publisher? What is the original horizontal dimension in pixels and what is the horizontal dimension in pixels once opened?

I am truly at a loss as to what could be happening here.

[Syberkonda]

Just now, Old Bruce said:

I don't see anything resembling corruption on the right edge, or anywhere else. 

Ah, now I see it.

Importing how? What sort of photos? Are these raw files? Affinity Photo (most likely) or Designer or Publisher? What is the original horizontal dimension in pixels and what is the horizontal dimension in pixels once opened?

I am truly at a loss as to what could be happening here.

This is affinity photo and it's happening with both RAWs and jpegs. The horizontal dimension in pixels is 4736, which is the same once opened. I'm importing it into Affinity Photo using the "open with" dialogue in Windows, but this also happens when opening an image from within Affinity. The issue also happens whether the images are stored on my NAS or locally.

[Old Bruce]

3 minutes ago, Syberkonda said:

This is affinity photo and it's happening with both RAWs and jpegs. The horizontal dimension in pixels is 4736, which is the same once opened.

Could you check your camera and see if the raw file size is 4736? Affinity Photo tries to use the entire sensor's image data and a lot of other software ignores the edges.

I haven't seen this and I use Canon's CR2 raw files and the Serif raw engine as opposed to the Apple raw engine which is available to Mac OS users. It is a Sunday afternoon here on the Wet Left Coast, I am sure that others with more experience will chime in once the real week begins, sit tight.

[Syberkonda]

1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

Could you check your camera and see if the raw file size is 4736? Affinity Photo tries to use the entire sensor's image data and a lot of other software ignores the edges.

I haven't seen this and I use Canon's CR2 raw files and the Serif raw engine as opposed to the Apple raw engine which is available to Mac OS users. It is a Sunday afternoon here on the Wet Left Coast, I am sure that others with more experience will chime in once the real week begins, sit tight.

This photo was taken using my A7IV's APS-C mode. I just took a new image and the horizontal dimension is 4736 on the RAW file when shooting in APS-C mode. However, this has also occurred with full-frame files and even jpegs from my Pixel 6 Pro in the past.

This image of two flamboyant cuttlefish shot using my Pixel 6 Pro in jpeg form was corrupted in July 2023, however the image has existed since the previous December and was already posted online. Unfortunately, the corruption was so bad that it corrupted the bottom half of the image. I ended up having to Frankenstein what was left over of the full res file with lower res versions of the image posted online. Unfortunately I don't have the corrupt version of this image anymore.

Notably, this occurred when importing the image into Affinity over an OpenVPN tunnel that I was using to connect to my Synology NAS while I was out of state. The more recent corruptions have occurred regardless of whether I am using OpenVPN to connect to my NAS or whether I am on the same network as my NAS. It also occurs when I have the image stored locally on my computer and not my NAS.

 

Curiously, the DSM viewer does not seem to acknowledge that the corrupt pixels exist. By that, I mean that the corrupted pixels are missing altogether in its preview of the images, as though the image were cropped. However, this corruption again only occurs after importing a file into affinity for editing.

Edited February 4 by Syberkonda

[debraspicher]

36 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Could you check your camera and see if the raw file size is 4736? Affinity Photo tries to use the entire sensor's image data and a lot of other software ignores the edges.

I was thinking the same thing. But they're mentioning bottom half of an image now in the above post...

@Syberkonda Can you attach a throw away RAW we can just test ourselves on our end? It would exclude your setup. (Something non-important but shows corruption for you)

[Syberkonda]

50 minutes ago, debraspicher said:

I was thinking the same thing. But they're mentioning bottom half of an image now in the above post...

@Syberkonda Can you attach a throw away RAW we can just test ourselves on our end? It would exclude your setup. (Something non-important but shows corruption for you)

Here you go! Thanks for offering to test!

OSK07731.ARW

[Oufti]

On 2/4/2024 at 9:44 PM, Syberkonda said:

Curiously, the DSM viewer does not seem to acknowledge that the corrupt pixels exist. By that, I mean that the corrupted pixels are missing altogether in its preview of the images, as though the image were cropped. However, this corruption again only occurs after importing a file into affinity for editing.

I don't think your images are corrupted by Affinity Photo; it seems to be the reverse. Affinity is too generous. It shows all, even the "rotten" edges.
Old Bruce said it already:

On 2/4/2024 at 9:41 PM, Old Bruce said:

Affinity Photo tries to use the entire sensor's image data and a lot of other software ignores the edges.

Other image editing software give a smaller size to your image and even miss some of the real pixels seeable in AP, beside the repeated pixels.

It looks like Affinity does not use the same dimensions for your file (4736 × 3132 pixels, where Preview and Graphic Converter announce 4608 × 3072) and then it eventually repeats the edge pixels on right or bottom sides to extend the image to fill it. (Or this comes from the camera…)

Note also: in AP, there are extra pixels, well drawn, at the bottom of your photo (height 3132 vs. 3072). 

But what troubles me is that if I set a guide at 4608 pixels, it is smaller than what I see in other programs?
Look how the white shell is complete in Preview (said to be 4608 pixels wide) but the blue guide set in Affinity at 4608 pixels is crossing the shell ??

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Oufti said:

But what troubles me is that if I set a guide at 4608 pixels, it is smaller than what I see in other programs?
Look how the white shell is complete in Preview (said to be 4608 pixels wide) but the blue guide set in Affinity at 4608 pixels is crossing the shell ??

Did you account for the extra pixels on both the left and right edge of the sensor that Affinity Photo will show? In other words, start from the center and count outward to the documented sensor size.

[Syberkonda]

1 hour ago, Oufti said:

I don't think your images are corrupted by Affinity Photo; it seems to be the reverse. Affinity is too generous. It shows all, even the "rotten" edges.
Old Bruce said it already:

Other image editing software give a smaller size to your image and even miss some of the real pixels seeable in AP, beside the repeated pixels.

It looks like Affinity does not use the same dimensions for your file (4736 × 3132 pixels, where Preview and Graphic Converter announce 4608 × 3072) and then it eventually repeats the edge pixels on right or bottom sides to extend the image to fill it. (Or this comes from the camera — I don't know exactly how it works…)

Note also: in AP, there are extra pixels, well drawn, at the bottom of your photo (height 3132 vs. 3072). 

But what troubles me is that if I set a guide at 4608 pixels, it is smaller than what I see in other programs?
Look how the white shell is complete in Preview (said to be 4608 pixels wide) but the blue guide set in Affinity at 4608 pixels is crossing the shell ??

Very interesting, the Windows 11 photo app shows 4736 X 3132, as does GIMP.

I'm looking online and it looks like the A7IV's APS-C mode is in fact 4608 X 3072. What's even weirder is that many of my APS-C images don't have any "rotten" pixels in them at all, yet Affinity and the Windows 11 photo app see them as 4736 X 3132.

When affinity brings in full-frame images, which are supposed to be 7008 X 4672, it brings them in as 7028 X 4688, but doesn't usually show any rotten pixels.

I wonder if there's a way to disable bringing in these edge pixels. 

Edited February 5 by Syberkonda

[walt.farrell]

48 minutes ago, Syberkonda said:

I wonder if there's a way to disable bringing in these edge pixels. 

No. 

If they're not useful to you, on a given image or in general, you must crop them off. Or use a different raw developer.

[NotMyFault]

If you use lens correction (which most people want), specifically barrel distortion correction, there is no longer any 1:1 relation between RAW sensor pixel (x and y amount) and resulting pixel amount, as transparent areas are normally cut off. 
 

I have no actual evidence, but I assume most RAW converter will actually scale the image to the „advertised“ pixel size to preserve the field of view.

To find out, we can try to compare out of camera jpg with RAW files with lens correction activated / not activated in Affinity (new stack)

[Ron P.]

I opened the OP image in both AP 2.3.1 and the current Beta 2.4.0.2256.

AP 2.3 reports the size as 4736 x 3132 and shows the smearing

AP 2.4 reports the size as 4692 x 3132 and there is no smearing.

FWIW, Corel PSP opened the image showing the 4736 dimension and the smearing.

[Dan C]

Welcome to the Affinity Forums @Syberkonda & thanks for your report!

Our most recent version of LibRAW in Affinity Photo V2 retail - which the app uses to develop RAW files - had only just introduced support for the Sony A7 IV when it was added to Affinity Photo and this version of LibRAW imports the full sensor size for the image, which may show additional pixels not present in other editors/image viewers.

However as Ron has mentioned above, Affinity Photo V2.4 beta includes an update to LibRAW - which seemingly has corrected the import size for these RAW files to be auto-cropped to the expected size and therefore no longer displays these additional pixels.

If you'd like to sign up and test the beta before this update is released, you can find out how in the below post -

Alternatively, if you don't wish to install a beta version alongside your retail version then I'd recommend simply cropping the images in Develop, until this update is released.

I hope this helps