Colourspace/management issue - WTF???

[tirediron]

Okay, I just finished shooting a local Christmas parade (This gallery) and I'm flumoxed with the final result. Viewing the images in Capture NX, or CS3, they're exactly how I want them to appear. Viewing them in a web-browser, or with MS Picture & Fax viewer, etc, many are dull, desaturated, and frankly, look like crap. # 15 is a perfect example; it looks fine in the editors, but is, to say the least, lacking otherwise, or at least so it appears to me.

I'm using sRGB across the board (camera, Capture NX, and CS3) as this batch was meant primarily for the web and using a colour-corrected monitor. Is this simply a result of viewing in non colour-managed applications? I've never noticed it before, at least not to this extreme degree.

I'd be grateful for any input on the problem, as well as to anyone who might want to take the time and check out the images and provide their thoughts on how they appear, esp. if you're using a colour-corrected monitor.

TIA
John

 

[davebmck]

They look fine to me, not flat nor desaturated. I am using Firefox as my browser.

 

[dkf10425]

Microsoft browsers and picture viewer do not support color management. Images are usually undersaturated or oversaturated. Firefox does support color management if you enable it. You can google "gfx.color_management.enabled" to get instructions on enabling it.

 

[tirediron]

They look fine to me, not flat nor desaturated. I am using Firefox as my browser.

Hmmm... interesting. Thanks. Is FF a colour-managed browser?

 

[davebmck]

Apparently so, but I don't know that I have enabled it. I'm going to check the above link and see.

 

[RyanLilly]

Hmm... The only browsers and programs I have use color management, however, when I use save for web, my jpegs always look like desaturated crap, If I resize manually than just do a "save as"-jpeg, they look just fine.

 

[RyanMillerPhoto]

You "may" be saving your jpeg files in a different color space than your PSD or Tiff files. I ran into this a few years back. Make sure that there is no change in color space such as Adobe RGB versus sRGB. The chances your viewers will only use browswers with color management is slim.

 

[Joves]

They dont look flat in IE for me. And what no close up of the concretepump with lights? You have the mixer.

 

[Garbz]

Wow missinformation in this thread. Ok here's the deal.

Non-colour managed apps don't mean that the colour displayed is wrong. It just means that the colour displayed will only work if you have sRGB files, AND an sRGB monitor to view from. This latter one especially these days with wide gamut Dells flooding the market is causing problems too.

Ok lets assume that your monitor is of the standard cheap sRGB type:
If the image is in sRGB as the chosen colour space when you save then it should look the same in Internet Explorer and in Windows Picture and Fax viewer. If this is the case then Photoshop is setup incorrectly. Probably pulling an incorrect colour profile from windows display properties (under advanced -> colour management) In this case the colour managed apps will show you the wrong thing and the non-colour managed apps are right.

If windows picture and fax viewer and internet explorer show DIFFERENT images, then the image is NOT sRGB. end of story go back to the start.

Now assuming your computer has a wide gamut monitor (i think it doesn't):
Windows Picture and Fax viewer and Internet Explorer will both show a different image from photoshop, and assuming that it's setup correctly the image in internet explorer would be MORE saturated so I won't pursue this further.


Firefox IS both source and destination colourmanaged. But to enable it you need to go into about:config and set the options starting with gfx.colblahblahblah to true. If you have a wide gamut monitor you also need to set the other gfx option to the monitor profile. Only then is firefox also properly colour managed.

I'd check the images and photoshop. Either you missed a step or photoshop is not setup correctly as the likely culprit.