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Once again, you have to measure the color in the document window with something, & if not with the Digital Color Meter then what are you using for that comparison?

 

You use the same tool (Digital Color Meter or any other system wide color picker meter) to measure the difference of color between the two mentioned parts in the Affinity interface. Let me know if anything is not clear.

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You can make a screenshot and measure in AP

 

actually the colors seem to match in this case

 

so apple color picker indeed seems to go through different layers of color management for the document and the UI, interesting

Edited by MBd

 

 

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You use the same tool (Digital Color Meter or any other system wide color picker meter) to measure the difference of color between the two mentioned parts in the Affinity interface. Let me know if anything is not clear.

If you are saying the two parts are the color shown in the Color panel and the document window, then I get exactly the same values when I drag the Apple Color Meter aperture over them, either in the document window or anywhere in the Color panel that shows that same color (either of the larger color wells or the little picker well), providing that:

 

1) I have set the Apple Color Meter to use the same display color profile as the document,

2) that color profile is available from the popup in the meter & exactly matches the one used by the document, and

3) the system display profile is set to the same one as the display showing the document window. For me, that is the one that came with my iMac, calibrated at the factory for that specific iMac, which I assume is probably slightly off due to aging of the display.

 

I have not tested this with an external monitor; however, when all of the above conditions are met there is no difference at all in the values. If not all of them are met, there is a difference, but I expect that.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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You can make a screenshot and measure in AP

 

actually the colors seem to match in this case

 

so apple color picker indeed seems to go through different layers of color management for the document and the UI, interesting

 

I still get the difference in colors. Does not matter if measuring on a screenshot, or directly on the interface. It also doesn't matter if it is with DCM or AP color picker. Can you try with this screenshot? post-1106-0-04962500-1485458517_thumb.png

 

If you are saying the two parts are the color shown in the Color panel and the document window, then I get exactly the same values when I drag the Apple Color Meter aperture over them, either in the document window or anywhere in the Color panel that shows that same color (either of the larger color wells or the little picker well), providing that:

 

1) I have set the Apple Color Meter to use the same display color profile as the document,

2) that color profile is available from the popup in the meter & exactly matches the one used by the document, and

3) the system display profile is set to the same one as the display showing the document window. For me, that is the one that came with my iMac, calibrated at the factory for that specific iMac, which I assume is probably slightly off due to aging of the display.

 

I have not tested this with an external monitor; however, when all of the above conditions are met there is no difference at all in the values. If not all of them are met, there is a difference, but I expect that.

 

I'm too using the default and reccomended color profile for my mac.

 

The fact that the problem happens conditionally depending on the selected monitor profile indicated that affiniy is not applying the same color conversion on the document and color picker. 

 

The fact that you keep talking about monitor ageing makes me believe you don't understand what is happening, just stating random facts, since that does not influence the measurements taken in any way.
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The fact that the problem happens conditionally depending on the selected monitor profile indicated that affiniy is not applying the same color conversion on the document and color picker.

Maybe I was not very clear about this, but I do not get any differences between the color anywhere in the Affinity window when sampling from any part of it with the Apple Color Meter. The differences only occur between the numbers shown in the Meter & in Affinity.

 

In other words, the Apple Color Meter does not show different values when its aperture is over some colored part of the document & when it is over the Color (or any other) panel displaying that same color, but those values may be different from the ones Affinity displays for the same color. Each app is self-consistent individually but they are not consistent with each other unless the three conditions I listed obtain.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Each app is self-consistent individually but they are not consistent with each other unless the three conditions I listed obtain.

 

I'm talking about lack of consistency inside of a single app: Affinity. Not talking about Affinity vs DCM

Just try different color profiles in the system preference until you find one which makes affinity show different colors inside the app. 

I have some profiles which make the colors consistent, but I'm using the profile made for this display.

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I'm talking about lack of consistency inside of a single app: Affinity. Not talking about Affinity vs DCM

Except that you are comparing what Affinity reports to what DCM does, which fundamentally reduces to if you trust the accuracy of DCM more than Affinity.

Just try different color profiles in the system preference until you find one which makes affinity show different colors inside the app.

 

Aside from the ones calibrated for my specific iMac's display, I have 11 system profiles to choose from in System Preferences > Displays > Color (if I uncheck "Show Profiles for this display only"). I have tried them all. All of them show different numbers in DCM from what Affinity does but none of them shows any difference for any color displayed anywhere within the Affinity app. I do not know how to be clearer about this -- I do not get the same results shown in your screen shots, regardless of which of these profiles I use.

I have some profiles which make the colors consistent, but I'm using the profile made for this display.

 

Just to be clear about this, you are not using a profile made for your specific display; you are using one Apple made for your type of display. (For more about that, see for example this OSXDAILY article.) I do not know if this makes a difference but I think it should not. You might try calibrating your display (& any external ones you use), using the instructions in this article if you do not have a hardware calibrator, but I doubt that will make any difference.

 

Anyway, back to the first point above about trusting DCM, I just noticed you said in your first post that you are testing with an sRGB 16 bit document. Please try this: Set Affinity's Color panel to display Hex RGB sliders & (very important!) to 16 bit display mode. Now compare what DCM shows to what Affinity does. At least on my system (specs below in my sig), DCM truncates 16 bit values to 8 bit ones -- it does not round up to the nearest 8 bit value, it just shows the two leftmost hex digits. So for example any color slider value between EB00 & EBFF is shown as "EB" by DCM, even though for half of that range a more accurate 8 bit value would be "EC."

 

So it all boils down to this:

1. Just as the article you linked to says, DCM only approximates the document's color values.

2. For the best approximation, use a system profile calibrated to the specific display the application window appears in.

3. For any document using greater than 8 bit color, DCM should at best show rounded down 8 bit color values. If the difference is greater than that rounding error then something is wrong somewhere, but where that might be is still unclear, at least to me.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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I tried and measured colour values both in document and in colour picker. They show different values.

 

Screenshot%202017-01-27%2008.33.15.gif?d

 

R is off,

document:

 

Screenshot%202017-01-27%2008.42.16.png?d

 

picker:

 

Screenshot%202017-01-27%2008.42.05.png?d

 

R C-R boilings are beside the point which is that colour picker just displays different colour than in document.

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I tried and measured colour values both in document and in colour picker. They show different values.

They do not show different values for me (or apparently for Leigh). 

R C-R boilings are beside the point which is that colour picker just displays different colour than in document.

 

I do not know how to be any clearer about this: the color picker does not display different color values on my iMac than in the document, as measured by Apple's DCM.

 

There must be a reason for our different results but I have no idea what it is. My "boilings" are intended to make sure we are all talking about the same thing, using the same settings or any other settings that would explain it, but so far nothing seems to do that.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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"Except that you are comparing what Affinity reports to what DCM does"

No. Thought this had been clarified, you keep regressing to this idea which is not related to the problem. At this point I'm only talking about the color output by Affinity. Nothing to due with the color code displayed by Affinity, or the values stored in the file. (we can get to that later in another thread)

 

"I do not know how to be clearer about this -- I do not get the same results shown in your screen shots, regardless of which of these profiles I use."

 This has been understood. You cannot reproduce the problem. It is only noticeable with certain color profiles, none of them causes the problem for you. If you are curious try the profile I've attached, would be interesting if you cannot reproduce the problem with it.

Color LCD-60F5227B-D14A-FB6B-554F-E301D534C60C.zip

 

"Anyway, back to the first point above about trusting DCM, I just noticed you said in your first post that you are testing with an sRGB 16 bit document. Please try this: Set Affinity's Color panel to display Hex RGB sliders & (very important!) to 16 bit display mode. Now compare what DCM shows to what Affinity does. At least on my system (specs below in my sig), DCM truncates 16 bit values to 8 bit ones -- it does not round up to the nearest 8 bit value, it just shows the two leftmost hex digits. So for example any color slider value between EB00 & EBFF is shown as "EB" by DCM, even though for half of that range a more accurate 8 bit value would be "EC.""

 This is interesting information, but again, irrelevant for this discussion. The colors I've selected are representable accurately with 8bit. The problem still occurs with a 8bit document.

 

 

"So it all boils down to this:

1. Just as the article you linked to says, DCM only approximates the document's color values.

2. For the best approximation, use a system profile calibrated to the specific display the application window appears in.

3. For any document using greater than 8 bit color, DCM should at best show rounded down 8 bit color values. If the difference is greater than that rounding error then something is wrong somewhere, but where that might be is still unclear, at least to me." 

1. I don't care about the document color values at this point. Just the color output by affinity, which is not consistent between different parts of the interface. That might be useful to reveal some further possible problems I would leave that for another thread.

 

My "boilings" are intended to make sure we are all talking about the same thing, using the same settings or any other settings that would explain it, but so far nothing seems to do that.

Thats all good, but this topic is complex and it is easy to derail the discussion by introducing misinformation which is sometimes misleading and besides the point. That might be one of the reasons some of these discussion get nowhere and specialised software like Affinity and Sketch are still displaying colors differently.

There is at least one inconsistency from Affinity's side, so lets try to isolate it and get at least one fixed?

 

I tried and measured colour values both in document and in colour picker. They show different values.

 

R C-R boilings are beside the point which is that colour picker just displays different colour than in document.

Thank you!

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Sorry for not replying sooner but I can see there's been a lot of discussion about this already.

 

I couldn't see the issue but it doesn't mean i'm right - I will look into this further to see what could be happening. When I have more information I will reply to this thread.

 

Thanks again!

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Sorry for not replying sooner but I can see there's been a lot of discussion about this already.

 

I couldn't see the issue but it doesn't mean i'm right - I will pass this to our developers to see if they can shed any light on what could be happening. When I have more information I will reply to this thread.

 

Thanks again!

 

Thanks, could you try with the color profile I've attached in the previous post?

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aristidesfl,

 

I tried using your Color LCD profile on my iMac. Unlike every other display profile I have installed on my system, it indeed does show different values for the UI vs. the document. It also changes my display to a very yellowish one with blues rendered as bright reddish purples. I compared it to the iMac profile I normally use with ColorSync Utility & it has a much narrower gamut.

 

I also did some checking comparing colors picked up by Apple Color Picker's eyedropper & applied to objects in Affinity & in Graphics Converter 9, using DCM to compare values. According to DCM, none of them match each other, nor do they match the color square picked up at the bottom of the Apple Color Picker window! This is true regardless of the system display profile I use.  :wacko:

 

I have no idea what all this means; I just mentioned it in case it provides a clue for someone with a much better understanding of this subject than I do. However, until this is resolved somehow, I am not going to trust the accuracy of DCM, not for Affinity & not for any other app.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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aristidesfl,

 

I tried using your Color LCD profile on my iMac. Unlike every other display profile I have installed on my system, it indeed does show different values for the UI vs. the document. It also changes my display to a very yellowish one with blues rendered as bright reddish purples. I compared it to the iMac profile I normally use with ColorSync Utility & it has a much narrower gamut.

 

I also did some checking comparing colors picked up by Apple Color Picker's eyedropper & applied to objects in Affinity & in Graphics Converter 9, using DCM to compare values. According to DCM, none of them match each other, nor do they match the color square picked up at the bottom of the Apple Color Picker window! This is true regardless of the system display profile I use.  :wacko:

 

I have no idea what all this means; I just mentioned it in case it provides a clue for someone with a much better understanding of this subject than I do. However, until this is resolved somehow, I am not going to trust the accuracy of DCM, not for Affinity & not for any other app.

 

Even if DCM is not accurate in the way one would expect it to be, if it reports different values for different apps, you can probably be sure those apps are displaying colors differently. There is no indicator that Affinity is the one displaying colors correctly. Affinity colors also differ from Sketch for example. 

 

On the other hand the Apple Color Picker seems to have some kind of quirk going on, which I reported to Apple on 17-Jun-2014. It was marked as a duplicate of issue 3666617 which remains open until today. If you select a color with the color picker, and then use the eye dropper to pick the color from the corner where the color is displayed, it will select a different color. 

 

jPg7238.gif

post-1106-0-70187800-1485626493_thumb.gif

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