ACES OCIO support & workflow in Affinity Photo by Serif
In addition to 32-bit editing support, Affinity Photo also implements OpenColorIO; a color management system that provides a full color managed workflow. It is predominantly used for motion picture production but can be used for any situation where accurate end-to-end color management is required.
Download and extract your chosen OpenColorIO configuration to a folder.
MacOS: From the Affinity Photo menu, select Preferences.
Windows: From the Edit menu, select Preferences.
On the Color tab, under OpenColorIO Configuration File, choose Select and navigate to the extracted directory. Choose the .ocio configuration file.
MacOS: Under OpenColorIO Search Folder, click Select and choose the extracted directory (it should already be the current highlighted directory from when the .ocio configuration file was selected).
You will be prompted to restart the app, which is necessary for the OpenColorIO settings to take effect.
Affinity seems to bake the ICC at export, especially when exporting 8bit JPG files. This is a dramatic issue and making the export to JPG impossible as it results in an unwanted “double sRGB (transfer function)” effect.
thanks for sharing this. i am new to ACES color management. i had some problem understand how to correctly using this,
so basically i use ACEScg in blender and render still with open EXR format.
then, what should i do with my color setting in affinity to make sure i edit in ACES and but viewing in srgb?
i tried copy your setting, but the color does not match what i get from the render exr.
any though about this?
• You indeed export a linear-ACEScg EXR (half 16 or full 32bit float) from Blender or any other DCC/renderer.
• Add an OCIO layer. You can find it at the same place where you have HSL, white balance, etc.
—↳ Set the “source color space” to “ACEScg” (applicable to other compositing software, in this case, Affinity, although I would not define it as a compositing software like Nuke or Fusion).
—↳ Set the “Destination Color Space” to “output_sRGB”.
Side note: I do not export 8bit integer images with Affinity Photo (only used it to export as EXR) and I do not use it much in my pipeline as it is not available on Linux. That said, from my past experience with it, I was not able to export an 8bit integer image file like JPG, hassle-free. The issue that I remember is that it exports with the native ICC profile baked on top of the OCIO ODT (output_sRGB). There are perhaps workarounds online (and some forum posts about it) but I did not bother myself as it is not part of my pipeline and I expect Serif to fix it in the future, or rather, ASAP as it is quite important.
Known issue