Colour problems in Affinity Photo

[Greg Booth]

Hi all,
    I've got a problem with colours in affinity photo. My photo is of a high street shop 'Superdry' which has an illluminated bright red sign, but when I load the RAW file (NEF) into affinity the sign is bright white with a red outline. If I load the RAW file into Nikon's own RAW developer it looks correct (i.e. bright red).
I was thinking this may be a colourspace problem but this stuff is new to me and anyway how could affinity get it so wrong? If I export as JPEG (from within Nikon S/W) it's correct, so how could this red be available in a JPEG but not in affinity's (larger) colourspace?

I've supplied screen grabs of the RAW file loaded into Nikon's NX-D app and Affinity Photo, so you can see what I mean.

Hope someone can help, otherwise I'm going to have to develop RAW files with the Nikon S/W and just use affinity photo for JPEGs.

Thanks in advance,

Greg.
 

 

[Pšenda]

The histogram shows, that it is against the NX-D pushed to the left.

Did you make the white level balance?

[Greg Booth]

Hi Psenda,

I included the histogram in the pics so people could see they are very different. NX-D is obviously doing some processing on the RAW that Affinity isn't.

As far as I know both NX-D and Affinity are using the same white balance but this seems too extreem to be a white balance issue, I've tried lots of different settings including white balance but no adjustments I perform make the white turn into the original red I photographed.

Greg

[John Rostron]

43 minutes ago, Greg Booth said:

NX-D is obviously doing some processing on the RAW that Affinity isn't.

 

Or could it be the other way round?

I notice that in the Affinity histogram, there is a green spike at the RHS, not present in the Nikon histogram. This presumably corresponds to the white on the sign. Have you tried adjusting the levels to get rid of this spike?

John

[Greg Booth]

Hi John, thanks for your reply.

I've just tried selecting 'Show clipped tones' and it does indeed show that the sign is clipped, but I'm unable to drag it back (if I drag the tone curve all the way down and to the right, which makes the photo two-tone black and white, the sign does turn red).

I suppose my question now is why is it so far out of gamut (i.e. clipped) in Affinity but not in NX-D? I thought Affinity had a larger colour workspace. I've tried a few different colour profiles but they don't seem to make any difference (I'm very new to this and probably need to learn more about colourspaces!).

Greg.

[John Rostron]

I think that my contribution above exhausts what I can usefully advise. However, I suggest that you include a link to your RAW file so that other knowledgeable people can try for themselves.

 

John

[Greg Booth]

Thanks John, good idea - here it is:

Both camera and Affinity are set to sRGB if that helps (although I understand they are not identical).

Thanks folks,

Greg

GMB_0298.NEF

[v_kyr]

The short answer is, it's due to their RAW conversion engine which isn't that good at all for NEF files here. Further you overall better stay with Nikon NX-D as a RAW converter since it produces the most accurate results out of NEF files (...who should know that format and it's cam settings etc. better than it's inventor). - Beside Nikon s/w, the DxO RAW converter and C1 also can produce quite good results here with a little bit more settings tweaking.

[Greg Booth]

Hi v_kyr,
    I've come to that conclusion myself - NEF RAW files do look a lot better in NX-D.

I think I will try setting both the camera and Affinity to Adobe RGB and take the photo again to see if that's any better  - (I'm thinking it must be a colour profile thing).

Anyway, It's not really a problem, I'll develop in whichever looks best for each particular photo, Affinity has excellent editing tools for JPEGs so it's still worth the money!

Thanks for your help folks.

Greg.

 

 

[v_kyr]

You can give it a try (shoot in Adobe RGB color mode) if it makes any difference, or check with some other converters which also use dcraw as their underlayed RAW conversion engine here if those handle it different for NEFs here. However in sRGB mode you can't tweak this afterwards successfully with the Serif RAW engine.

[Roger C]

@Greg Booth  Just a reminder that after processing your RAW file, save it as a 16 bit TIFF file (if possible) rather than as a JPG. This will maximise the quality of subsequent manipulations in Affinity. Keep working in TIFF until you're finished.

Affinity has great capabilities: you want to maximise this. Don't unnecessarily restrict the software by saving down to JPG too soon; you will be discarding image information that Affinity could have used to keep the image quallity higher.

Best only to go to JPEG once you're ready to print or upload.

 

[Greg Booth]

Roger you must be psychic - I was just this minute wondering whether exporting from NX-D in tiff 16bit would be better and I got a notification of your post!

Thanks for confirming that - that's what I'll do.

Greg

[Roger C]

Psychic?

Glad it helped.

[Greg Booth]

I've just tried it - it looks great.

This forum rocks!

Greg.