Meters for color...asking for bright ideas to help afdesign work.

TestTools · September 11, 2018

Hi Again.

Background: I have created a series of images that have the purpose of going from a media player through a projector onto a screen, to judge contrast...or, at least, one component of contrast – being able to see into the dark actually. Run it one day – perhaps after the facility is calibrated and note the numbers, then run it later and look for changes. Since I don't know whether a room can 'see' 1% or a tenth or needs 5% luminance for any of the values of RGB and Black (grey), I am making a series for the preliminary tests.

Problem is:

I export from the attached afdesign piece, with all the 'meters' and scales, etc., with a black background and secondly with a transparent background. They look nice. The PNG (shown) doesn't do them justice at all, but the 16 bit TIFFs are great (attached is Adobe RGB, but the original work and final format is 2020).

But when I place them into Final Cut Pro, the one with the black background look completely different than the one that is transparent (I have to place it against a black background from within FCPx).

The color bars seem almost the same. The problem shows up especially in the red markings and numbers – on the transparent TIFF they are clear as a bell, bright, crisp (perhaps too bright.) The same red markings and numbers of the TIFF made with Designer derived black comes out barely see-able...as the screen grabs below show. I think the color at the center of the bars is also impinged with black.

Because the 'clear' background TIFF shows up as white in Mac Preview, there is no way to judge with the eyes when comparing with the black background TIFF. And I don't have another program that I trust to see what is happening. I suspect that the black is leaching though the colors, even though they are full opacity.

Any ideas? If they really are the same but for the background in AD, then I'll ask a FCPx forum.

These are screen grabs from Final Cut of two TIFF files derived from the Affinity Design file, the top one with the black baked in, the bottom one with the black added as background to a 'transparent' background image.