Strange behaviour with PSO FOGRA 52 profile

[brad12majors]

Hey Affinity!

first of all, thanks for your wonderful pieces of software.

I found a strange behaviour in Photo and Publisher on the Mac, thou.
My print office needs CMYK-files with the "PSO FOGRA 52 uncoated" ICC-profile. I downloaded and installed it (and I even managed to load it in Publisher ;-), but now I get strange grey colors on the screen depending how I build them.
Screenshot and original file are attached.

The left upper rectangle is black with an opacy of 55%, but – as you can see – it looks more "brownish" than grey. For comparison there's a 45% grey rectangle on the right.
Now – and this is the tricky part – if I copy the color of the upper left "brownish" rectangle (with the color picker), create a new rectangle, an paste the color, it looks grey as it should (lower left rectangle).
Weird enough, the color picker tells me both rectangles have the same CMYK-values, but – as you can see –look very differently. 

I know this might be a problem with the ICC-profile, but I expect many print office work with these profiles these days, so does anyone have an idea what's wrong here?

Cheers 
Juergen

FOGRA52 weirdness.afphoto

[DWright]

Thank you for reporting this I have logged this with our QA team to investigate further 

[elev1N]

Hey there,

Any news on this subject? I have pretty much the same problem on Windows. I am using the same profile: PSO Uncoated v3 (FOGRA 52).

Left: How its should be
Center: How it is at the moment (It has a slight brownish tint)
Right: How black shouldn't actually look like (It has a greenish and yellowish tint. It looks more like dirt than black.)

Even the Red looks different, more like slightly washed out.

[brad12majors]

Hey Affinity!

Any news on the subject?

To be honest, as long as there are issues with affinity's color management (especially like the two left squares in the very first example, that report to have the same cmyk-color, but obviously don't) – I don't really dare to give out cmyk-pdfs to my print office...

Cheers Juergen

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[brad12majors]

Hi Lagarto,

thanks for your detailed answer. Good to hear that this basically a cmyk-transparency problem. It's strange though that you only get this brownish tone of half-transparent black squares when using the FOGRA52 profile. With the older FOGRA 29 you get grey tones (as it should be). That's why I thought it might be a general issue of affinity's color management when using modern profiles. 

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

I opened your file and could see that you have mixed color definitions in your objects (some in RGB and some in CMYK). Perhaps this file was initially created as an RGB document and then a different color profile was applied.

However, I created a similar document from scratch with the FOGRA 52 profile from the very beginning, and there's no change. Brownish grey, and a strange color copy behaviour. If I export it as pdf, the brown is gone, and I get 3 different tones of grey (which still should be the same, more or less?)

3 hours ago, Lagarto said:

Generally it is advisable to work consistently in one color space. Transparency rendering of CMYK objects is typically not accurate at edit-time so if you only need a tone of a CMYK based color, you get reliable edit-time rendering by using a tint, rather than an opacity setting.

Hm, you mean, if I work on photos in Affinity Photo to import them into Publisher later, I already should use cmyk? 

Cheers, Juergen

PS. But it's good to know that Indesign handles this no better

 

FOGRA52 weirdness cmyk.afphoto

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[SomethingRandom]

I know this issue is 5 years old, but I ran into the same problem in Affinity Publisher. Maybe this is helping somebody.

For me it helped to first convert all placed images in the document to FOGRA52. Then I changed the profile in Publisher to FOGRA29 (correct display of grays and blacks), and then to FOGRA52. The display was then also correct for FOGRA52, whereas a direct conversion made them look brownish, as OP described.

I wish Serif is on the subject. PDF export for print is the most crucial part of prepress, and we need to trust the software.