But why?...

[kami]

I just noticed that when viewing pictures on any software (Lightroom 2, CS4, or windows photo gallery) the colors are much more rich.

When I use the same photos as a background for my monitor, they get slightly desaturated.

Any reason why this is? They're both being viewed on the same monitor so I don't understand why the pic would change if used as a background.

My monitor is a Samsung 24" syncmaster LCD.

 

[Garbz]

All those programs are colour managed, and I am not sure about windows photo gallery but the other two are output colour managed as well so the problem could be one of two things:

a) the image is in the wrong colour space such as AdobeRGB instead of sRGB, check this in photoshop using the "conver to profile" option. The image viewers would read the colour profile and adjust their output accordingly. The windows wallpaper does not.

b) The monitor profile is loaded incorrectly, resulting in either your three image viewers displaying the wrong colours (if your monitor is perfectly sRGB compliant) or the wallpaper displaying incorrectly if your monitor has an extended gamut. Check the colour management tab in display properties to see if anything is loaded in there. Alternative in photoshop go to colour settings, hit the drop down under working profile and see what is written next to "Monitor Profile" this should be either the correct colour profile for your monitor or it should be sRGB or missing for any generic sRGB compliant monitor.

 

[kami]

Thanks for the input. I never knew all the different devices have their own different color characteristics and capabilities.

Anyway, the monitor was already at sRGB (I just bought is last Christmas), and I changed the color profile in LR2 to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (what do the numbers mean BTW?) And I don't see any changes in the photos in LR2 even after switching between different color profiles.
Shouldn't you be able to see any changes right away?

Out of curiousity, I uploaded a photo to flickr and I was suprised that it matched the monitor background and not the photo when veiwed in LR2.

However the photos I've printed slightly matches the pics viewed in LR2.

Now I really want to get to the bottom of this color mismatching and get everything in line. I don't do a lot of posting of pics online, I mostly print them out for friends, family (b-day cards, scrapbooking, post-cards, etc) and for decorative framing purposes at home.

 

[Garbz]

Ok first question, the numbers are the IEC standardisation code. sRGB is an international standard.

What did you change in Lightroom 2? The output colour profile? The changes should be visible once you export it. If my guess is right (and it would be if LR2 was set to something other than to output sRGB) then your previous export was in ProPhoto or AdobeRGB and thus Lightroom is right and the windows desktop / flickr (or rather internet explorer) are displaying them incorrectly.

Re-export the images after changing the colour profile (also make sure under file options when you export you selected sRGB right under JPEG) then set it as the background again (you need to do this manually, windows makes a copy of an image you set to background so overwriting it doesn't update it automatically), and re-upload it to flickr. That if it is what I think it is (wrong image colour space) then it should be fixed.