Colour problems - suggestions appreciated

[jaomul]

Hi all.
I have a 5 year old Toshiba laptop. I had it set up with Lightroom, anything I exported looked same on computer after export as it did in Lightroom, also was ok when uploaded here or to Flickr and crucially when printed.

I replaced laptop with new one recently. It's calibrated, runs Windows 8.1 but now when I export photos look washed out, dull. When I upload to web on my computer they look dull, when I view the upload on phone etc they look good, if I import a photo edited in Lightroom back into Lightroom it looks good again.

I think it's to do with how Lightroom is using colour space etc. This is a problem as now I can't set up to print correctly (I don't use Lightroom to print). Is there any way to set up computer so it shows photos as Lightroom shoes them. Thanks

 

[Forkie]

Windows Picture Viewer ignores colourspaces. Avoid viewing your photos with it whenever possible.

 

[jaomul]

I view in picassa, and compared with Windows picture viewers, both look washed out. I uploaded photo to Flickr, on my computer it looks washed out, but on other devices it looks ok. I'm bit lost on this problem

 

[goooner]

In windows 7 you can 'calibrate' your monitor. I did this and it improved considerably (it was mostly my gamma that was too high). Should also be available in Win 8.1...
In windows 7 it was under control panel-display, and then on the left there was a calibrate color option. It then leads you through a few steps, this fixed it for me. The angle of your display is sometimes also quite important on a laptop...

 

[jaomul]

I don't know what the problem is, but it's not calibration, the screen is calibrated, everything l view in Lightroom looks good, outside it's not

 

[Alexr25]

What colour space are you using when you export your pictures? Your problem sounds like a mismatch between the exported image colour space and the colour space that application viewing the image expects to see.
Applications that are not colour profile aware default to sRGB so for maximum compatibility you should set up lightroom to export images in the sRGB colour space.

 

[jaomul]

When I export I always have sRGB selected. I did try other settings last night just to see what happened but sRGB was best but still way off

 

[Braineack]

are you using a custom profile to view, but outputting to a standard sRGB?

 

[jaomul]

are you using a custom profile to view, but outputting to a standard sRGB?

Not that I am aware of. How could I check this? Thanks

 

[Alexr25]

Well if you are sure that you are exporting the images as sRGB then the only thing it could be is your monitor calibration.
Just because the image look good in lightroom it does not mean that your monitor is correctly calibrated. Ideally you should use a calibration device such as spyder or colormunki but in a pinch you can use the Windows display calibration utility.

 

[jaomul]

As said in first post monitor is calibrated, I use an x rite colormunki smile. This issue is something to do with color spaces Lightroom uses and computer uses, just I'm not informed enough to know how they interact.

 

[Braineack]

are you using a custom profile to view, but outputting to a standard sRGB?

Not that I am aware of. How could I check this? Thanks

Shouldn't you then be using "other" on the export settings for color space and pick your calibration file?

 

[jaomul]

are you using a custom profile to view, but outputting to a standard sRGB?

Not that I am aware of. How could I check this? Thanks

Shouldn't you then be using "other" on the export settings for color space and pick your calibration file?

I'm not 100% sure what you mean. I export sRGB always. On my last computer this worked fine. Are you saying my newer computer may not be sRGB? I understood most laptop monitors running Windows were, but again I could be wrong. I did try other export colour spaces also just to see if any improvements, if anything they were worse. Seems sometimes upgrading is actually downgrading

 

[KmH]

What type of display does the new laptop have? TN? IPS?
Can it display 8-bits of color?
Pros don't use laptops for editing.

Read through this, if you haven't already:
Lightroom Help | Color management

 

[jaomul]

What type of display does the new laptop have? TN? IPS?
Can it display 8-bits of color?
Pros don't use laptops for editing.

Read through this, if you haven't already:
Lightroom Help | Color management

I'm no pro. Thanks for the link. My calibration system just tells me the screen is calibrated, I'll see if I can get a file to load into Lightroom to fix