Color space problem....I think

[Neiby]

Couldn't you just print the photos out instead of sending them to your client via the internet?

She's just a friend who agreed to be my guinea pig to get some practice shooting people. She's not a client and we won't be printing them out, or at least I won't be. Otherwise, that would definitely solve the problem!

 

[Neiby]

Good morning.

Yes, I'm sure; Windows isn't sRGB by default. The Windows OS will support an ICC profile for your display but otherwise it's not color managed. The Windows Vista Viewer (Windows Photo Gallery) isn't Windows it's a software utility supplied with Windows. It does support embedded ICC profiles and so it should read your files sRGB tag. Windows IE (broswer) does not support embedded photo profiles and so will not read the sRGB tag. It ignores the profile. Many people assume that ignoring the ICC profile is sRGB by default -- it's not. Firefox and Safari on the other hand do support ICC profiles and will correctly display photos using the photo's ICC profile.

Lightroom supports color management however it doesn't allow you to alter it's working color space. When a file is exported, Lightroom will do a color space conversion to the export space i.e. ProPhoto to sRGB. During that conversion the appearance of the photo can change if the two color spaces have different boundaries. With ProPhoto and sRGB this is the case. The ProPhoto space is considerably larger than the sRGB space. Therefore photos do change when exported from Lightroom to sRGB JPEGs. Adobe provides a Lightroom plugin (download from website) that will permit you to preview the conversion.

Flickr leaves embedded ICC profiles intact and is a good hosting service for that reason. Some hosting services remove the ICC profiles.

Windows Photo Gallery and Firefox should both display the same JPEG file identically; they do on my system. IE however may display the photo differently and Lightroom may display the processed RAW file differently.

Joe

Thanks for all the great info! I saw a Microsoft tech note that said Windows used sRGB by default, so I was confused about what was actually happening. I use Chrome as my browser and all of these images look great.

If it's a color space issue, though, why is it happening if I convert the image to black and white and reduce the exposure? My noob assumption was that that would have eliminated the color space as the problem.

I'm a total noob to this. Photography is hard enough, but this kind of thing really makes it frustrating. But it is a great learning experience!

Thanks again!

 

[clanthar]

Chrome is like IE; it ignores ICC profiles. In that case the same image viewed in Chrome would be displayed without processing the profile while Windows Viewer would process the profile. That could cause the image to display differently then between Chrome and Windows Picture Viewer. A B&W image saved as a JPEG still has an ICC profile.

It's very frustrating I agree and it's a complete mess especially for non-professionals who are just trying to enjoy taking photos.

Some more info about sRGB: sRGB was developed in the mid 90s by a consortium of companies most notably led by HP and Microsoft. The goal was to develop a color space that was a "best-fit" match to electronic display hardware -- your generic computer monitor. They did a good job and sRGB has gone a long way to making digital photos shareable in electronic form. :thumbup: This has often gotten watered down to "the internet is sRGB." It's not. An sRGB file has the best chance of appearing unchanged if it's displayed with something like Chrome or IE that ignores the profile because sRGB was designed to the native performance of the hardware. What we need is for Microsoft to follow through with what they started and for an industry-wide acceptance of a standard. sRGB is that standard and Google should embrace it. Likewise what the bleep bleep is up with Microsoft adopting the standard for their viewer and then not adopting it for their browser?!! One more step: One color space isn't enough. The physical characteristics of your display are not a good match to the physical characteristic of print media so we legitimately need other color spaces for our photos. The only reasonable option then is for image software to be able to both appropriately read different color spaces (process the ICC tag) and convert images between color spaces. Instead we've got a dumpster full of cr*p software that either ignores the ICC tag or even strips it off (image host sites).

Gary Ballard does a great job with the topic, but it is complex:

WEB BROWSER COLOR MANAGEMENT Tutorial - Test Page FireFox Safari Chrome Internet Explorer IE 9- FILES have embedded ICC profiles Photoshop ColorManagement

Consider Firefox as a superior web-browser if viewing photos is high on your priority list.

Joe

 

[Neiby]

Wow, what a mess! Now I'm wondering what I can do to avoid this. I have no idea what I did to create the problem. My camera is set to use sRGB (it has sRGB and Adobe RGB as options). I've taken many pictures over the past month and processed tons of them in LR and have never run into this until yesterday. It's very odd why I would suddenly be running into this when there were no hints of it before.

I'll read that color management tutorial and see if I can get a handle on it.

Thanks for the help!

 

[clanthar]

Your problem just cropped up and may or may not be color space -- you've still got testing to do.

It doesn't matter what color space is set on your camera if you're working RAW. RAW files have no color space. Color space is for RGB photos. When a RAW file is converted to an RGB photo the color space is then assigned. Lightroom use the ProPhoto color space and won't let you change that. Photoshop on the other hand does allow you to set and change working color spaces.

So in your workflow a RAW file from the camera is brought into Lightroom. Lightroom opens and displays that photo in the ProPhoto color space -- that's your first conversion to a color space. When you export from Lightroom to a JPEG, TIFF, etc. (RGB photo) Lightroom will convert your image from the ProPhoto color space to your selected export color space. At that point the photo can change appearance. You'll want to verify the acceptability of that conversion. Examining the photo with Windows Viewer should do that as we know Windows Viewer will process the color space tag. Now you have a finished RGB photo with a properly embedded ICC profile that specifies the color space. Software that displays your photo should read that tag.

I hate to do this to you, but there's more. Your monitor should also have an ICC profile. Lightroom uses it correctly to display your photos, so does Windows Viewer. I don't know what Chrome does. The software that's displaying your photo has to correctly use both profiles; the one for your photo and the one for your display.

Joe

 

[Neiby]

Oh, joy! lol In all serious, I *really* appreciate all this help. This is all stuff that I'm going to have to deal with anyway, so now is a great time to do it. With regard to my monitor's ICC profile, is that something I need to set in my Windows display properties, or is that something I configure in LR? My guess is that LR just uses whatever I have set in Windows, so I should set it in Windows. Do I just do that under Color Management in my Display Settings?

I think I will also be switching back to Firefox. I just verified that even the latest version of Chrome does not handle color profiles correctly, but FF does with no problem. I switched to Chrome from Firefox about two years ago, but this will make me switch back, I think.

I'm trying to figure out how to prove what the actual problem in this case is. When doing a search for "lightroom export clipping", I saw a lot of people with the same problem. Since the problem just cropped up yesterday, I'm not convinced this is the problem. This is certainly something I need to be aware of, but it may be a red herring. The real source of this problem might lie elsewhere. Any ideas on additional troubleshooting steps I could take?

Again, I really appreciate your time and this information. I'm learning so much on this forum that it's hard to keep up!

 

[clanthar]

Correct about the monitor profile -- you set that in Windows display settings. Lightroom will use the system default monitor profile. At some point you'll want to pay attention to:

1. The physical capabilities of your display i.e. can your display handle all the color of the sRGB space? ($$$$$)
2. Your display ships with a default ICC profile that was set at install. You'll want to eventually get a better one that's custom created for your monitor -- more $$$$$: X-Rite i1Display 2 Colorimeter / color calibrator

(There are more expensive hobbies).

You're right; the problem you're having is recent and you can't assume this is it. You have detective work to do and lots of reading.

Good luck,
Joe

 

[Neiby]

Here is my monitor:

Viewsonic » VX2260wm 22" Widescreen LCD Monitor

It's not a super amazing monitor, but it certainly seems to be decent enough for now. I'm sure it needs to be calibrated, though. I tend to like my computer experience to be on the cool side, so that's probably affecting my editing decisions.

I'm going to try to shoot some more pictures tonight if I have time. I'm going to reset my camera to factory defaults in case I changed something in there that is causing this. I've already updated LR to the latest release. I'll just keep playing with it and try to nail down a culprit.

 

[Neiby]

I'm stumped. Every photo I've tried to export as JPEG since that night comes out fine, but every pic I took that particular night comes out really goofed up. I even took a screenshot of the image in Lightroom and pasted it into GIMP and then exported it. Same thing! lol Everything since then comes out just fine. I can't even begin to imagine what sort of problem is causing this and I'm tired of thinking about it. I wish I knew, but it's making my head hurt.