Colour Gamut is off.

[RichardM]

Trying to make/loft/print a poster, I have come across a very annoying problem, with both Designer and Photo. I have NOT check for this in Publisher yet.

I wanted to add some white test boxes into the picture for further commentary and figures.

White is not displayed correctly within the working space, even though the monitor has no difficulty doing so.

This is the original picture I am working on.

 

This is how it looks in Affinity Designer...

 

As can be seen, the background of the original, which is #E6FCFF is rendered in Affinity Designer as #F8F9FB

.

This is the test colour card I made in Xara Designer, superimposed over the picture (as above) and below.

 

The colour on the Right is #FFFFFF, The panel in the middle is from the first colour pick (using Xara Designer Colour Picker tool OFF the Affinity Designer Screen)

The green and black are simply for contrast and clear marking

Of note are a couple of things.

1) Whilst the colour settings on screen I am using are slightly off, they are not this far off.

They are obviously quite capable of producing clear #FFFFFF, (almost - #ECFFFF!) as seen in the Test Card AND the various Tool Option Boxes on the menu bars of both Designer and Photo.

2) The aberrant colour rendering is not consistent..

 

Same thing happens in Affinity Photo.

 

Finally, here are two other colour test cards to demonstrate this further...

 

 

And how it appears in Designer.  Simple Mk 1 Eyeball can see there is a mismatch!

 

Clearly there is a problem with the colour rendering.

Monitors are coming of the GTX 960.

 

What is going on here and what is the solution?

It is very very irksome.

Thanks

Richard

PS.. Everytime I save this a whole bunch of unwanted or duplicate pictures get saved.

Why is this?

 

 

 

 

[James Ritson]

Hi, this issue comes up quite frequently. The Affinity apps perform colour management from the document colour profile to the display/monitor profile—it's possible you have a defective display profile which was installed by default along with your monitor.

You will likely come across the issue with any colour managed applications (including Adobe products, just google "Photoshop whites are yellow" and this will be corroborated).

Ideally, you need to profile your monitor using a colorimeter/measurement device e.g. i1 Display Pro using either the software it comes with or displayCal. This will produce a proper display profile that works correctly with colour managed software. If this is not possible, you'll need to reset your display profile within Windows to the default sRGB device profile.

Here's a thread post with a solution, look specifically at step 6 for how to assign the sRGB device profile to your monitor: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/91411-100-red-in-document-and-color-picker-looks-orange/&tab=comments#comment-485651

 

Note that while this should work, it's not an ideal solution. In order to ensure accurate colour representation you should really consider investing in a colourimeter device and creating a custom profile. The Affinity apps are colour managed, so they will be able to use this custom profile to accurately convert the colour values from the document to your monitor. The reason you're not seeing the issue in other apps such as Xara Designer is because they likely do not perform colour management.

Hope the above is helpful to you.

 

[Edit] Here is another thread with the same issue (which also links to the steps provided in the thread above): 

 

[RichardM]

Hello James...

Thank You for the reply.

I specifically pointed out that on my monitor, white IS slightly off but in spite of that, the White of the Control backgrounds (in the Menu Bar) is pretty good (that is where I got the reading of #ECFFFF)... So even with its slightly imperfect colour settings, this monitor can display a very very close white.

So why does the active drawing area of Affinity products have this glaring disparity as indicated by my colour cards?

Incidentally, this does NOT happen in other graphics programmed (Paintshop and Xara Designer for instance.) This simple factual difference in performance would lead me to conclude this is certainly (much) more an Affinity problem.  

Regards

Richard

[Mark Ingram]

15 minutes ago, RichardM said:

Hello James...

Thank You for the reply.

I specifically pointed out that on my monitor, white IS slightly off but in spite of that, the White of the Control backgrounds (in the Menu Bar) is pretty good (that is where I got the reading of #ECFFFF)... So even with its slightly imperfect colour settings, this monitor can display a very very close white.

So why does the active drawing area of Affinity products have this glaring disparity as indicated by my colour cards?

Incidentally, this does NOT happen in other graphics programmed (Paintshop and Xara Designer for instance.) This simple factual difference in performance would lead me to conclude this is certainly (much) more an Affinity problem.  

Regards

Richard

Because we convert colours from document colour profile to screen colour profile. The other programs you listed do not do this. The Menu Bar may look white because don't perform colour correction there - only on the document and user interface controls that display colour.

[R C-R]

@RichardM, google "Photoshop whites are yellow" like @James Ritson suggested & you should see that the big difference is whether the app is color managed or not.

[RichardM]

Er... That is the type of answer that presupposes that everybody knows everything there is to know about 1) colour and 2) how various different software programmes handle it.

I think most people want a white to display as a white and if the programme interface can display a reasonable facsimile of such, it is difficult to understand why the working space can not do likewise.

In fact I did a check of a couple of things looking at colour profiles. I also reset my monitors to default soft setting and set the default colour profile. 

On another note, I think it would be good to check the time that people are actually posting as it may give a clue as to whether or not their screen colour temp has been changed automatically by their software! I just found out that my monitors are doing just that, so I turned the option OFF after resetting the monitors to factory default and all seems much better now!!   

Another thing that I discovered is that if the background is transparent, then whites show up as this yellowish tint. If the background is set as White , then whites in the images are ... much more white and other colours much more like the original .. amazing (no?)... even with ZERO transparency in the image.  Now is that something to do with whether or not the programme is color manage?

Thanks anyway for various explanations and I hope my discoveries will help others stumped (especially Night Time colour temp changes)

I think the programme color management could be more intuitive and very much doubt everybody who uses it understand colour profiles and how they are handled between documents and screens much better than I.

Maybe a couple of tutorials on this very topic would go down well?

 Best

Richard

 

PS Why did various images keep getting appended to bottom of first post?