Histogram appears incorrectly when developing raw images in the develop persona

[Perceptes]

I tried replying to this thread which seems related, but I didn't get a reply, so trying a new thread.

When I open a CR2 raw file, the histogram appears "squished" to the left side with a bunch of seemingly unused space on the right side. If I click the develop button to move into the photo persona (without making any changes to the image at all), the histogram is more evenly distributed in a way that matches what I expect. I've tried with the develop assistant set to both 16 and 32 bit modes and the results are the same. This happens only in the desktop version of Affinity Photo (I'm using version 1.6.7 on macOS 10.14). The histogram in develop mode behaves as I would expect in the latest iPad version.

Is there an explanation for this? Might I have something configured in a way that can be changed to correct this? Or is this a bug in the software? As it is, it's very hard to work with raw files on the desktop version of Affinity Photo.

Attached are example histograms from the develop and photo personas, following the flow I described in my second paragraph. Thanks in advance!

[firstdefence]

This appears to be a longstanding bug.

 

[Perceptes]

Thank you—I'd seen that thread too but wasn't sure it was the same issue I was experiencing. I'm really dismayed to see that this was reported almost two years ago and hasn't been addressed. As I mentioned, this makes the develop persona very difficult to work with—perhaps even useless. That's a major flaw that I would expect to be an absolute top priority for a quick patch release. How is this not more of a problem for people using Affinity Photo in the last two years? I have a Canon T7i which uses the CR2 format, which is very widely used. It must be affecting a huge percentage of users.

[firstdefence]

I think most people find alternative third party apps like Rawtherapee having other software to compare Affinity Photo against can sometimes gives us a perspective. Rawtherapee is free to use, it has its foibles like all software does but as a workaround to get raw files developed its certainly a good option. having these "buffer" apps available while Affinity work on fixes is probably a good thing.

I would like there to be a fast track patching system in place but I don't develop software so I have no idea of the complexities of a patching workflow, or what needs to be done in other area's prior to patching. I dare say its not as simple as we might assume because of the knock on effects in other area's.

[abcd]

That was my next question for Affinity as well:  Here are two histograms, one from ACR, and exactly what I would expect and the other is from Affinity of the same raw file.  I do a great deal of raw development by histogram as a quick roughing in step.  I can't do that with Affinity as I don't trust the histogram at all.

There are also included two highlight details from each of the developed raws with the Affinity white point brought up to match the ACR histogram.  It's pretty obvious how much detail would be blown out if it had been developed by histogram and not visually.

Affinity detail.tiff

acr detail.tif

[Perceptes]

I'm disappointed to see this wasn't addressed in Affinity Photo 1.7. It's still absolutely baffling to me that this isn't an extremely urgent issue for Serif and other Affinity Photo users. How on earth are people using Affinity Photo for raw photo editing with a histogram that's been broken for so long? Why doesn't Serif address this? This bug was the primary reason I gave up on Affinity Photo and reluctantly bought a Lightroom subscription, but I would prefer to return to Affinity if it was ever fixed.

[walt.farrell]

It was addressed in 1.7. Here's a histogram for one of my raw files in the Developer Persona, for example:

In 1.6 it looked squashed to the left, much like the one you showed.

I recommend you start a new topic in the appropriate Bugs forum, and provide one of your raw images that Serif can look at to see what the problem is.