At some point you will have to address this colour management issue

[Chris_Pearson]

This applies to Designer, Photo and Publisher. 

The way ICC profiles are accessed is a shambles.

It looks like the .icm extension is not recognised in many, if not all dialogues, and given that this is the Windows default, it's a big problem.

In our studio environment there are multiple workstations which have to access a huge number of colour profiles on a server - and none of the Affinity apps let us access them. Copying them all into the OS's default location, or any other location, on each workstation is not a realistic option.

Can someone from Serif please respond and let me know:

• how to get Affinity apps to recognise the .icm extension
• how to get Affinity apps to access colour profiles located on a network

These problems do not exist - and as far as I'm aware, have never existed - when using Adobe apps.

 

 

[Mark Ingram]

Hi @Chris_Pearson, thanks for your feedback. The Affinity apps will load colour profiles from 4 places:

1) Profiles attached to a monitor

2) System profiles in Windows (C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\color)

3) Installed profiles in Affinity Photo (C:\Program Files\Affinity\Photo\Resources\icc)

4) User profiles in Affinity Photo (%APPDATA%\Affinity\Photo\1.0\profiles)

There is a bug with loading profiles from (4) at startup, in that it is only checking for *.icc files. This should be trivial to fix, to allow *.icm files as well. Importing a profile via File | Import ICC Profile will filter for *.icc files, but if you type *.icm into the filename box it should work as expected (until you restart the application). I'll fix this as well to add the *.icm filter.

With regards to the "loading of profiles from the network", that's more of a feature request than a bug. How does Photoshop work? I looked at their documentation and it suggests that they only load colour profiles from the system (1).

Thinking of a work around for your problem, perhaps you could setup a symbolic link from (4) to your network share. That way we would load from the linked network location, rather than AppData.

[Chris_Pearson]

Hi Mark

we're getting somewhere, the .icc vs .icm problem appears to have been fixed in the latest release.

So in 'Photo' I can now File > Import ICC profile... and navigate to anywhere on the network, so I can access custom profiles that way; they're then available for printing. Although all that does is copy the profile into Affinity\Photo\1.0\profiles. In a dynamic environment where colour profiles are updated or replaced regularly, that's useless.

Symbolic links to a network folder don't work. Even if they did work, there's no common folder so I'd have to go through the routine 3 times. None of the apps will look into subfolders within %APPDATA%\Affinity\[Photo/Designer/Publisher]\1.0\profiles, any profiles have to be at the top level. I suspect that if this was sorted out, it would probably be enough just to paste shortcuts there instead of symbolic links.

If you're wondering why any of this matters, I'm in an environment where there are 12 printing devices, mostly wide-format inkjets and digital production presses, through which a very wide range of materials are printed, and we produce custom profiles for every combination; if these profiles need to fine-tuned, they over-write the original. And we need everybody to be using the same assets in order to achieve accuracy and consistency.