Inconsistent Color Values When Creating Palette from Document

[Canbot]

Hi Serif Team,

I've noticed an issue in Affinity Publisher (also happens in Designer/Photo) when using the “Create Palette from Document” feature:

The colors added to the new palette often don’t exactly match the original values used in the document. Even small differences (e.g. RGB 235/100/100 becoming 236/101/99) can be problematic, especially for branding or print work.

This seems to happen due to:

• Color space/profile conversions

• Blending modes or effects

• Possibly rounding during palette generation

While I understand that it's based on rendered appearance, it would be really helpful to have:

1. An option to preserve exact color values when generating palettes

2. A clearer explanation or toggle for whether colors are sampled from rendered output or original definitions

Thanks for the great tools – I really appreciate the Affinity suite and use it every day.

Best regards,
Can

[NotMyFault]

1 hour ago, Canbot said:

 

Hi Serif Team,

I've noticed an issue in Affinity Publisher (also happens in Designer/Photo) when using the “Create Palette from Document” feature:

The colors added to the new palette often don’t exactly match the original values used in the document. Even small differences (e.g. RGB 235/100/100 becoming 236/101/99) can be problematic, especially for branding or print work.

This seems to happen due to:

• Color space/profile conversions

• Blending modes or effects

• Possibly rounding during palette generation

While I understand that it's based on rendered appearance, it would be really helpful to have:

1. An option to preserve exact color values when generating palettes

2. A clearer explanation or toggle for whether colors are sampled from rendered output or original definitions

Thanks for the great tools – I really appreciate the Affinity suite and use it every day.

Best regards,
Can

how do you inspect color values?
info panel can deviates from color panel.

[Canbot]

I usually check colors via the Color Panel. I’ve also noticed the Info Panel can show different values sometimes – probably because it picks up the visible color on screen? Since I mostly work with vectors, I rely more on the Color Panel.

[NathanC]

Welcome to the forums @Canbot,

Can confirm I've replicated and logged this with the developers. I was able to get some significant deviations dependent on the colour space and profile used, with the exception of RGB/8 sRGB 2.1.

[Canbot]

Thanks for checking and forwarding – much appreciated.

[woefi]

3 hours ago, NathanC said:

dependent on the colour space and profile used

@NathanC Yes, but please:

also relay to the devs to NOT simply "match" colours on screen, which would be dependant on colour profiles, but read the "actual" color value from memory/colour palette. 

This is especially important for those of us who work with CMYK colours, where the AffinityApp obviously takes the (internal) LAB value of an existing CMYK colour and converts it back to CMYK. This "roundtrip-conversion" completely alters the colours and makes it unusable in print production workflows.

Example: take a "clean" yellow colour of 0/0/100/0 and _create_dokument_palette_ makes LAB L90 A-3 B86 out of it, which gives a "dirty" CMYK: 4/5/90/1.