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New to the forum here. I am a professional 3d artist, my usual software being 3ds Max, Corona Renderer, and Photoshop for still images. PS is the workhorse in my work whether it be for image manipulations, or texture creation and can run the gamut from straight forward colour correction on rendered images, to compositing 3D images in to photography. A friend of mine let me know about Affinity and i was very excited to find something that could potentially give Adobe a run for their money and break the monopoly and sway they currently have especially with their licencing structure.
I am having some trouble developing a workflow and pipleline in affinity and was hoping somebody here who knows affinity better could shed some light on this for me. My usual workflow for strict photoreal rendering is to do the main 32bit CC in my virtual frame buffer (established workflow for us, for those not in the know of 3D consider it a RAW editor), I would then take it to photoshop at 16bit, convert to smart layer and apply some additional work if needed using Camera RAW using Clarity, Shadows and highlight etc to pull some extra detail and contrast without crushing the blacks or losing the whites too much. I can then do additional layer work and painting/masking above this smart layer in the stack. If there is iterations and updates to the base render its just a case of replacing the smart layer which reuses all my previous work so that everything is consistent. This non destructive workflow is pretty important and avoids as much rework as possible.
Now to the problem. I tried to adopt something in affinity but just cant get anything to work the way I expect it to. My main niggle is in the way the colours are working. I like the Develop persona as 32bit seems to work more predictably as i would expect. However you can only save a preset here before applying the developed settings, no quick intuitive way to achieve the simple non destructive settings, plus the sliders don't work the way i would expect either in that they max out way before they would in Camera RAW. Its convoluted but i could maybe make that system work. But wait Affinity is 32 bit i think, so i can just use adjustment layers and live filters in the photo persona to do the same. Again convoluted but would preserve the non destructive nature i need. However even though its 32 bit the colours behave drastically different using individual adjustment layers compared to develop persona. Clipping and washing out and just don't work at all the way I need them too. I also tried a like for like comparison in 16bit but the colours clip far earlier than they do in PS.
Am I doing something wrong here or is it the way Affinity works for now? Please take this as constructive, Im not in any way criticising the software just highlighting shortcomings as it pertains to me. I love Affinity and think its fantastic software and wanted desperately to be able to shunt adobe to the side after years stuck in their ecosystem. I pine for the days when it wasn't subscription based and the software was released in far less buggy states. However as it stands I cant compromise my work for my want to replace it.
The first thing that comes to mind is that Affinity apps work differently when it comes to Colour Management than other creative apps. The Affinity apps perform what is called document-to-screen colour profile conversion, which can cause confusion for customers used to PS.
First of all, I assume you're using OpenEXR or Radiance HDR formats in 32-bit? 32-bit in Photo is obviously a little bit different as it's not just linear but also unbounded, whereas Photo's 16-bit and 8-bit formats are gamma corrected and bounded. This probably means there are two main points to address: tone mapping and compositing.
Adjustments like HSL, Selective Colour and others that tend to focus on colour manipulation are best saved post-tone mapping, where your pixel values will be in the 0-1 range. If you use OCIO adjustment layers (or check out my Blender Filmic macros which do away with the OCIO dependency) you can add these adjustments above the tone mapping layers or group. If you want to use the Tone Mapping Persona, I'd advise you to do Layer>Merge Visible and then tone map the merged pixel layer, then put your adjustments above this.
Hopefully by following the above advice, you'll avoid the clipping and washing out that you describe. I suspect you may not have tone mapped your image and are trying to use adjustments like HSL, Selective Colour on the linear values? Converting to 16-bit at this point will not help the issue, since unbounded values outside 0-1 will be clipped. You need to tone map first using methods described above, then you can manipulate colour freely.
That said, as I've covered above, there are certain colour manipulations you can do on the linear values pre-tone map. Channel Mixer, for example, won't clip values, nor will White Balance. I also do a lot of stacked astrophotography editing in 32-bit linear, and sticking a White Balance adjustment before tone stretching is a really powerful way of neutralising background colour casts. It's useful with render compositing too since you can completely shift the temperature and tint without introducing artefacting.
Yes i render out to EXR. To explain my general workflow i saved out all images from 3ds max as true linear images without tonemapping. I would then open them in Corona image editor and do my tonemapping there to bring the image down to better values closer to 0-1 (i could do this in the frame buffer within max if is so chose but this way provides maximum flexibility with renders for post production). I then save this image as 16bit exr with the tonemapping baked in. From here i bring it to photoshop and do some small bits and pieces like clarity, and playing with contrast, shadows and highlights in camera raw, If i needed to hand paint anything this is when i would do it before saving out as a jpg/png etc. The main benefit to this workflow is that is that changes to the base render are very simple, quick and consistent to perform, i can go back at any point and its a very fast process. Speed and flexibility being key here.
I do appreciate what you are saying. Photoshop is not fantastic in 32bit, hence why i tonemap outside and bring in a 16bit bound image rather than working exclusively in photoshop. Having worked in Linear workspace most of my career the pitfalls of it are burned in to my brain now To describe what i am seeing better, i am bringing the same 16bit image in to both Photo and PS and performing the same adjustments side by side and PS seems to just have more range in it which is what i am finding so weird. I tried doing all my 32bit tonemapping in photo just as test and i can certainly say it handles this considerably better than PS but doesn't beat my current way of tonemapping. Blender has certainly come on leaps and bounds and is a real contender, autodesk etc must be worried as they are really disrupting things. The filmic macros are essentially clamping highlights, applying different contrast curves, tints, saturations, white balance and applying LUTs is that correct?
I haven't configured anything in photo in terms of OpencolourIO, i was just trying a like for like comparison. Without going too much in depth as to why they are different./ This was the reason i asked here, as knew there would be some differences in the way the software handles colour and it would likely take me a while to find these on my own.
However this is using 256 colors and if my memories of 23 years ago are not confusing me, I believe that everything seems more ugly.
Was not the standard for that time 16-bit color?
I do not know exactly what video card I'm using, but I guess I'll have to switch.
Does anyone have a PC like this and have information on what I should expect?
I want to play games such as Phantasmagoria, Sim City 2000 and Sim Tower.
I do not know if I will have problems with the resolution using the current board and a 3dfx with DOS and win 3.x...
Almost any video card with 1 meg of RAM is capable of 16 bits (provided you've got the drivers), but in most 486 (and early Pentiums) the CPU may be underpowered. Most games from that era worked at 256 colors, so (unless you want to do some photo editing) using 16 bit color depth won't be any advantage.
Without a driver, neither Win3.11 nor Win95 will display more than 16 colors. Because they revert to standard VGA, which can't even do 256 colors in 640x480. (Win95 actually allowed to still select 8-bit and 16-bit, but would fail to actually use those modes)
An Am5x86 based 486 should have a full megabyte of video memory, 2MB not unlikely. With the correct driver for the configuration, you should get 16-bit color at 800x600 with 1 MB or up to 1152x864 with 2 MB.
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