Opening 16 bit black and white TIFFs in Affinity Photo

[floydonfire]

I've been scanning my old 35mm negatives with a Minolta Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV so that I can put them up on my website. The negatives and all black and white and in need of a bit of attention, so my plan was to run them all through Affinity Photo to remove any dust and scratches and tweak the levels. I did this a few years ago with an old copy of Photoshop CS2 with no issues, so assumed the latest version of Affinity Photo should have no trouble.

As I did the last time I scanned a batch of negatives, I have been scanning them with Vuescan as 16bit greyscale TIFF files.

When I open the resulting TIFFs in Affinity Photo however, they are opened in the Develop persona with the picture completely blown out. On some occasions they fail to open at all and leave either a blank window reading 0x0 pixels, or crash the app completely. I'm happy to provide a copy of the error log if you think that would be helpful.

I can kind of fix the blown out image (for the ones that do actually open) but it really shouldn't be necessary. The files which fail to open at all open fine in Preview, Photoshop CS2 and pretty much anything else I try to open them in. As it is, I am getting better results out of the almost 15 year old Photoshop CS2 than I am out of Affinity Photo. I know I could just use Photoshop, but my copy won't run on my current Mac so I have to open my TIFF files on an old Windows 7 machine. I would much rather however use Affinity Photo as I otherwise find it works very well for my needs.

Is there any way in which I can open these TIFF files normally in the photo persona? Is this a bug or the intended behaviour for 16 bit TIFF files?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[firstdefence]

Check the Develop Persona Settings, it might be applying a tone curve and exposure bias

[walt.farrell]

This was reported and logged as a bug back in April, here. Perhaps @MEB or another staff member can comment further?

[lepr]

.

 

 

[floydonfire]

Hi all, 

Many thanks for your responses. I note from @walt.farrell's link that this is an existing problem, as the symptoms seem to match my own exactly. It's a bit frustrating that this hasn't been fixed in the last six months, but at least I know the problem isn't my own incompetence!

I did go back and check the develop settings, but there was not tone curve or exposure bias being applied. 

I suppose I could work with PNG files, but I'd much rather stick to uncompressed TIFF for scanning. I think I may sadly have to abandon Affinity Photo for the time being until this problem has been fixed and use something else. The post from April mentions that GIMP is able to open 16bit greyscale TIFF files without issue, so I think I will look at using that instead. 

Thanks

[R C-R]

18 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

This was reported and logged as a bug back in April, here.

I was trying to test for this bug on my Mac, but at least with the (very!) few 16 bit greyscale TIFF images I could find on the web, I could not verify it -- the files always opened in "Greyscale (16 bit)" format in the Photo Persona, not into the Develop Persona.

So is it possible this is a Windows/Windows 7 only bug? If not, could someone attach a (preferably small file size) 16 bit greyscale TIFF sample that demonstrates the bug to a post here for me to test with?

[lepr]

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[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, >|< said:

The problem happens on my Mac and floydonfire has the problem on his Mac. 

There is a downloadable example TIFF in the thread to which walt.farrell linked.

 

I'm not sure I actually linked to the thread I intended to link to, unfortunately. Nor can I find the one that I remember that more specifically matches the OP's description.

Also, at this moment, the images mentioned in the thread I linked to seem to be offline.

[lepr]

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[R C-R]

47 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Also, at this moment, the images mentioned in the thread I linked to seem to be offline.

They are offline for me as well, but the confirmation that it is a bug that affects Macs is all I really need to know ... except maybe why what I could find from an online searched opened OK. That could be because they were small, less than 1 MB each, but that doesn't matter -- it should work correctly for any 16 bit greyscale TIFF file.

[floydonfire]

Hi all,

I don’t know if it will be too big, but I have put one of the images I was having trouble with on OneDrive for anyone who’d like to try it in Affinity Photo: 

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AicHLYxJy4LWgdgHyGFcrpZoC1iZ_Q

Hopefully it’ll work, but let me know if you’d like me to post it elsewhere. 

Thanks

Edit: the file comes out at just over 25MB

Edited October 8, 2018 by floydonfire
Added file info

[Medical Officer Bones]

A quick test of importing your 16bit greyscale TIFF file reveals that Photo indeed cannot open it correctly - or at least, Photo assumes it is dealing with a RAW file.

I also tested Krita, PhotoLine, InDesign, Xara Designer Pro, IrfanView, even OpenToonz (animation app), Scribus, and finally Affinity Publisher.

All applications load up your file without any issues, excepting both Affinity products. Even Affinity Publisher loads it incorrectly (too bright and washed out).

This leads me to believe that the Affinity developers have never tested actual 16bpc greyscale TIFF files while developing the import filters. I would call this a bit of an oversight (which is an understatement of rather planetary proportions).

The 16bpc PNG version loads up correctly, though. I would suggest that if you intend to use Photo for your image processing, you scan and save directly to 16bpc PNG files instead of greyscale 16bpc TIFF files.

[firstdefence]

Your image of the cat opens in Develop Persona, its too bright, this is how it opens for me.

This how it opens in Rawtherapee

[lepr]

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[R C-R]

1 minute ago, firstdefence said:

Your image of the cat opens in Develop Persona, its too bright, this is how it opens for me.

For me, it opens in Develop mode but it is completely black. Pressing the "Develop" button immediately crashed Affinity Photo.

The workaround of opening it in Preview app & exporting from that app to PDF sort of works, except that its 4468 × 2980 px image size when opened as a PDF in Affinity Photo have shrunk to 837.8 x 558.8 px on a 5100 x 6600 px canvas, & its color format is 8 bit greyscale.  

According to Finder's "Get Info,"  the exported PDF has a resolution of "612 × 792" presumably in points.

According to Preview app's "Inspector" window, the original tif's image DPI is 3200 pixels/inch & it is uncompressed. I wonder if that has anything to do with why Affinity Photo chokes on it?

[lepr]

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[lepr]

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[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, R C-R said:

According to Preview app's "Inspector" window, the original tif's image DPI is 3200 pixels/inch & it is uncompressed. I wonder if that has anything to do with why Affinity Photo chokes on it?

According to the thread I intended to link to (and will if I ever find it again) the problem is with one of the EXIF fields that has a value Affinity does not expect. 

[R C-R]

8 minutes ago, >|< said:

LOL. The workaround I suggested (and which works well) was to open the TIFF in Preview and export as a PNG, not a PDF!

Doh! 

[Fixx]

Affinity Photo opens 16-bit greyscale images just fine. Problem is with Vuescan's manner of writing TIF and I guess specifically EXIF. Either app devs should make corrections to their software to make Vuescan > AP work right.

[floydonfire]

It sounds like moving my workflow to using 16 bit PNG files could be a workable option then. Am I likely to experience any noticeable loss in quality from using PNG over TIFF? I was under the impression that PNG was a compressed format, similar to JPEG, and therefore not ideal for archiving or editing?

Alternatively—if I could work out which EXIF value is throwing off Photo—could I simply amend it with an EXIF editor to allow Photo to open the TIFF?

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, Fixx said:

Affinity Photo opens 16-bit greyscale images just fine. Problem is with Vuescan's manner of writing TIF and I guess specifically EXIF. Either app devs should make corrections to their software to make Vuescan > AP work right.

The metadata in the cat file provided by @floydonfire indicates it was created on a Minolta Scan Dual IV scanner, but how do you know if it was done with Vuescan rather than say SilverFast?

 

19 minutes ago, floydonfire said:

Am I likely to experience any noticeable loss in quality from using PNG over TIFF? I was under the impression that PNG was a compressed format, similar to JPEG, and therefore not ideal for archiving or editing?

PNG uses compression but it is lossless compression, unlike the lossy compression of JPEG files. There should be no loss of quality.

[lepr]

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[Fixx]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

The metadata in the cat file provided by @floydonfire indicates it was created on a Minolta Scan Dual IV scanner, but how do you know if it was done with Vuescan rather than say SilverFast?

He said: "I have been scanning them with Vuescan as 16bit greyscale TIFF files."

[v_kyr]

Opens fine in AD and other Mac related apps, also there isn't anything specific among the Exif data which should usually hurt. Thus I suppose it's pretty much an APh open/import file problem here for this one, aka distinguishing between TIF and RAW file format.