F_Kal Posted January 1, 2017 Share Posted January 1, 2017 Happy new year everybody! I was playing with the RAW development options in macOS's Photos app, and wanted to compare it against Affinity when I accidentally discovered that I couldn't reproduce the same white balance inside Affinity with Serif's engine, no matter how much I tweeked Temperature+Tint. Not being sure if that was a problem with Affinity or Apple RAW engine, I did a more extended test: I tried the same thing in Lightroom, Olympus viewer 3 (since it's an Olympus camera) and finally Affinity using Apple's RAW engine instead and these were all very close (and I'm sure I could make identical if I fine-tuned the more) - so it seems to me that the Serif's RAW engine is not rendering the colors correctly in the first place...? In the following tests I tried to roughly match the white balance only for the red in the bouquet and the gray/white of the wall. I was paying attention to the hue not the Noise Level/Vibrance/Saturation/Brightness or Contrast in this experiment so please ignore these for now. Here are the samples: Successful Matching Lightroom CC 2015.8 (probably using Camera RAW): Olympus viewer 3: Apple Photos App (probably using Apple RAW engine): Affinity Photo with Apple RAW engine: Unsuccessful Matching Affinity Photo with Serif Engine. When attempting to match the wall color the flowers had too much blue/magenta: Affinity Photo with Serif Engine. When attempting to match the color of the flowers, the wall would become too yellow: In the images you can also see the respective settings in each application. Thank you, -Fotis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hlarledge Posted January 3, 2017 Share Posted January 3, 2017 Thanks for posting this, Fotis. I saw a review on the web where someone was bashing AP because of this problem. I'm curious as to whether someone is working on this. F_Kal 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F_Kal Posted January 4, 2017 Author Share Posted January 4, 2017 Hi @hlarledge! Thank you for the feedback! Does the article refer to the white balance issue in particular? I'd be curious to read this review if you happen to know where to point me to! As a sidenote, I've read many reviews/complaints on other photography related sites, but most people who were having issues with the quality of Serif's RAW development engine were referring to some earlier version that would open files flat without applying the slightest adjustments (eg. chromatic noise reduction), thus creating a very coarse (ie raw) and seemingly "ugly" initial result when/if compared to other engines such as Apple Camera RAW or the Olympus Viewer. These were unfair comparisons imo though, since those engines out-of-the-box would apply preset adjustments and it was rather easy to achieve a very similar result with Serif's engine during the RAW development process - if only you would tweak the bars. Eventually Serif started applying some subtle and safe initial adjustments to match the results expected by users - for instance any image you open for development starts with preselected 40% chromatic noise reduction and automatic lens correction enabled. So far, I've only detected 3 issues with the RAW engine: - This particular problem with the white balance - Problems with automatic lens correction for specific lenses and cameras (expected to be ironed out in the upcoming beta) - issues with the demosaicing process (here and maybe here) - even though I'm not sure I prefer with demosaicing in other RAW engines: they sacrifice too much actual information for less high-frequency-noise. hlarledge 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hlarledge Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 Hi @hlarledge! Thank you for the feedback! Does the article refer to the white balance issue in particular? I'd be curious to read this review if you happen to know where to point me to! I wish I could find it, F_Kal. I tried after I read your post. No luck, but I am certain they were describing the exact same issue with the white balance. They were also comparing with Apple Raw, which I couldn't test, because I am on Windows. F_Kal 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F_Kal Posted January 4, 2017 Author Share Posted January 4, 2017 thank you @hlarledge! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
glootech Posted February 1, 2018 Share Posted February 1, 2018 Hi, More than a year later, the problem is still there. If someone is looking for a workaround solution then I can provide one: After developing the RAW I use selective colour adjustment layer. Then I make the following changes in Yellows: * Yellow: -35% * Magenta: +65% With this adjustment layer the colours look a lot more similar to the ones in Olympus Viewer 3. Of course you can tweak the values as per your preference. Would love to see it fixed in the RAW engine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jiri12 Posted February 2, 2018 Share Posted February 2, 2018 My business is (also) reproduction of paintings for books. And I need exact colour management, starting with colour reference card on the photo of painting, etc. I simply canceled all Adobe applications, because I love AP, but now I have serious problem during raw processing in AP, mainly becauce of white balance, but not only. So my work flow now is to process all RAWs in the Canon Digital Photo Professional and just after that only open the tiff in the AP. :-(( Maybe I need more practice :-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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