Colour profile recognition and handling

[Chris_Pearson]

I can't figure out where Affinity Photo looks for colour profiles: I've put the custom profile I'm trying to access in Windows' default location and in the icc folder within the application's own folder.

There seems to be inconsistency in recognising the (very common) .icm extension, so I've renamed .icm to .icc and still no joy. 

Does the programme read the profile list at startup or will it recognise new additions without restarting? 

I'm trying to replicate a workflow I use in Photoshop which is as follows:

Open scanned image (AdobeRGB) > assign custom scanner profile > convert to AdobeRGB. Where should I put the custom profile so that Affinity can access it? 

[Gabe]

Hi @Chris_Pearson, 

Welcome to the forums.

You need to install your profile and restart so that the new profile is picked up by the system. 

Thanks,

Gabe. 

[Chris_Pearson]

Thanks for the reply, but this isn't a general question about using colour profiles. 

Briefly, I need to know where Affinity looks for ICC profiles. And it seems odd that in some dialogues it recognises the .icm extension and in other it doesn't.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Chris_Pearson said:

I need to know where Affinity looks for ICC profiles

Have you tried simply telling Windows to install the profile, rather than trying to put it into the right place yourself? Right-clicking on the file and choosing Install should take care of it, I think.

[Chris_Pearson]

My question isn't about how to install profiles, it's to understand why Affinity doesn't recognise many of them. Currently I have over 200 installed profiles, about 120 of which are RGB, and if I try to assign / convert to a profile Affinity only sees 2 or 3 dozen of these. 

So to rephrase the question: can Affinity access ICC profiles which are not in C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color ?

 

[James Ritson]

Hi Chris, ICC profiles can be custom-installed to Photo if you wish—a typical directory structure for this is C:/Program Files/Affinity/Affinity Photo/Resources/icc. It will also however pick up any system-installed profiles. It may be worth copying your profiles to this directory and seeing if they are detected.

You've said you have over 200 profiles, but about 120 of them are RGB—so are the others CMYK or a different colour model?

Possibly the reason you're not seeing them all through the Assign/Convert dialogs is because Photo only lists profiles for the document's colour model. So you should see all of your scanner device profiles that are RGB in an RGB/8 or RGB/16 document. If you want to use profiles that are CMYK, you'll need to either convert your document to CMYK and assign the relevant CMYK profile, or use a Soft Proof adjustment to stay in RGB but assign a profile that is CMYK.

I would however ask whether the image files from the scanner (I'm assuming TIFF) are already tagged as CMYK if the scanner profile uses a CMYK model.

If you add a Soft Proof adjustment layer to an open image, do you see all 200-odd profiles listed there?

Additionally, if you were able to attach a sample scanner profile that doesn't appear in the profiles list, we may be able to examine it and understand what the issue is (this would really help).