DNG images are heavily desaturated

[Alex_M]

I recently got a new phone, Samsung S10, and I wanted to try the RAW shooting mode. In this mode the phone produces DNG files so I loaded them up in Affinity Photo to see how they come out and was surprised how heavily desaturated the are, nothing like the actual scene I shot. Even moving the saturation slider in the Develop Persona all the way doesn't manage to recover the full saturation of the real image.

I have Photoshop also installed so I tried the same image and it reads the DNG files fine with proper saturation as shot. Please see the attached image for comparison. Left is Affinity Photo and on the right is Photoshop.

Any ideas why this happens and how to fix it?

[walt.farrell]

It would probably help to supply one of the actual DNG files, Alex.

[Alex_M]

No problem, here's the original DNG.

20190926_155034.rar

[walt.farrell]

Thanks. I see the same thing in Photo for that image (but I can't compare with Photoshop).

Bringing up the black point helps. I see in the Histogram that there's a significant area at the lower end with nothing, followed by an area with very low levels, and eliminating them makes it significantly closer to what you showed in Photoshop. There's also a big spike at the top end of the Histogram.

Bringing the input black level up to 11% and the input white level down to 97% helps. But I can't explain the differences between how Photo is processing the image and how Photoshop processed it.

 

[Lee D]

The Samsung S10 isn't on the supported RAW list for the SerifLABS RAW engine that Affinity Photo uses, this may explain the difference. You can always bump the Saturation, Vibrance and White Balance to get a better match. If you was using the macOS version, you could switch the RAW engine over to Apples Core Image engine which opens the image similar to PS.

[Alex_M]

Thanks for letting me know, Lee. No, I'm on Windows 10. Do you think this can be improved in the newer versions? In the mean time I will try adding saturation layers after developing the photo.

[Joachim_L]

8 minutes ago, Lee D said:

The Samsung S10 isn't on the supported RAW list for the SerifLABS RAW engine that Affinity Photo uses, this may explain the difference.

Not really. The Samsung S10 is from 2019, PS CS6  Camera Raw 9.1.1 is from 2015 and it looks much better in Photoshop.