Need serious help with my colour management

[parshole]

Hi there,

I am really having problems on my pc ever since I calibrated the monitor. The colours are seriously different in photoshop and in my microsoft picture viewer. The photos in photoshop are beuatifuly saturated and the white balance is great, as soon as I save it as a jpeg and open it in the microsoft picture viewer it is seriously desaturaded, looks flat and worst of all the colour balance has a greenish tinge to it. WTF, it is freaking me out. I have checked the colour profiles in photoshop and light room and they fine. I have not taken the photo's to the printers yet to see how they look once printed. The colour profile I use is Adobe RGB.

From start to finish: I upload the NEF files into lightroom then convert to DNG where I then open them in photoshop RAW to tweak the colours and exposure ect. Once I am done with that I open them in photoshop to finish final post processing and save them as jpeg. The jpegs once re-opened in photoshop look great but as soon as they are opened in any other program that is not adobe the photos look really crappy and stress me out big time.

Please can someone help me!!!!!! I see a couple other posts on the net that relates to this one but the tips most of them give dont help.

I have attached a screen shot I took of the photos opened alongside each other in photoshop and ms picture viewer

Thanx

 

[Ysarex]

A couple things:

Photos you're going to post on the internet should be sRGB and not Adobe RGB. You want to do that because not all applications that display photos are color aware and correctly process the photos ICC profile.

I believe however that Windows picture viewer does process the embedded profile. Are you absolutely certain that your JPEG output files have color space tags?

You mentioned calibrating your monitor. The problem could be here. Photoshop looks for and uses your monitor profile to display your photos. Are you certain that Windows, Windows Picture Viewer and Photoshop are all using the same monitor profile?

Joe

 

[KmH]

It sounds like you are having a color space incompatibility issue.

If you haven't already, you might want to visit this group of tutorials - 10 Top Photography Composition Rules | Photography Mad

 

[Garbz]

You say your problems started when you calibrated your screen? That rings alarm bells. I think your problems aren't with the colour space of the image but rather the colour profile of the monitor. Photoshop will read this information from windows, windows picture viewer will not. With some monitors you just have to trust photoshop and ignore the other applications.


except....

The common thing that happens in this case is the colour profile of the monitor is BIGGER than sRGB which manifests itself as windows picture viewer being over saturated, not under saturated. The most common example of what your seeing is the incorrect application of colour profiles.


Here's a test you can do:
In photoshop open the image.
Click File -> Save for Web and Devices.
Look for the checkbox that says "Convert to sRGB" in some photoshop version it was on a drop down menu, I can't remember which.
Then save the image and open it in windows picture viewer.

If that works, hallelujah. Stop using AdobeRGB and start using sRGB. In most pictures you won't notice the difference, and the vast majority of printing companies won't support AdobeRGB anyway. Also never save an AdobeRGB file as a JPEG an 8 bit wide gamut image is susceptible to banding. If you're going to do wide gamut then keep it 16bit and save in a 16bit format like TIFF or JPEG2000.

If it didn't work then open up your monitor calibration program and screenshot the resulting profile information for us. I'm interested in the triangle drawn on the horseshoe plot, and also what monitor you have.

 

[parshole]

Hey guys, thanx for the help. Unfortunately my computer has been packed away in a box for the past two weeks so have not had a chance to try your recommended solutions. Just got a few questions: Joe: How do I check if the programs are all using the same colour profile? Garbz: Can I really just work in sRGB? I have been told that I should work in adobeRGB the convert it... Blah blah...

Thanx,

Julian

 

[Garbz]

Unfortunately you don't know. It's a case of figuring out what software does what based on the action it takes. It's easy to identify though:

If you have a monitor which requires output profiling, then open an sRGB image with internet explorer, and another image with your program of choice. If they look different your program of choice is using the monitor profile (internet explorer is not colour managed to output profiles).
There's very little photo software that's not aware of normal colour profiles these days but if you take an image, save it as an sRGB, then convert it to ProPhotoRGB and save another copy, if both copies look different in your software then the software isn't aware of working profiles.

My advise on sRGB is this: Every wonderfully colourful image you have ever seen on the internet is sRGB. 99.9% of monitors on the market are sRGB. You can work in AdobeRGB but the only benefit you get is if you have a wide gamut monitor or do some fancy printing. You gain something in some ludicrously colourful scenarios, but for the most part the world we live in fits nicely in the sRGB gamut. I'll dig up a comparison tonight.

 

[parshole]

Ok, so I set up my pc yesterday afternoon and played around with some colour settings. I went to display - settings - advanced - colour management. I see the default colour profile my computer is using is that of the spyder 4 express calibrator. Ok, then I played with the settings in Photoshop tried sRGB, adobeRGB and Spyderexpress profiles. When I use the spyderexpress profile as my colour working space and save the images as jpeg they look identical between photoshop and other programs. If I save them with the sRGB profile or adobeRGB profile then the colours go all funky again. Can I work with the spyderexpress profile in Photoshop or am I seriously way off? Unfortunately I have not had an internet connection set up on my pc yet so have not been able to test your method.

 

[Terenas1986]

I've set my monitor to AdobeRGB, and Lightroom and Photoshop and all others too... and it solved my color display and printing problems. (Printer has its own profile of course...)

 

[parshole]

But if I set my monitor to adobe or sRGB then what is the point of calibrating my monitor because I would be changing it from the calibrated profile.

 

[Garbz]

Terenas DON'T. You're likely cancelling all your problems out but I wonder now how others perceive your images.

Pashole a quick primer on colour management:

There are three basic kinds of colour profiles:
- Input : ACR, Lightroom, and what not use this to convert RAW sensor data to your Working Profile
- Working : The working profile describes the current file's colour space. This is needed so that applications know what colour a certain RGB value actually has. Applications need to be aware of working profiles to do this, like I said most programs these days are. Any program that isn't assumes the profile is sRGB. This is why it's very important to ensure when you send others a file or upload a picture to the internet that it is in sRGB, otherwise there's no guarantees that the other person is seeing what they are supposed to.
- Output : These are the profiles for your display and for your printers. In Windows they are selected in the colour management settings in control panel. For a monitor the only acceptable solutions here are to use sRGB, download a colour profile from the manufacturer, or generate your own. These should NEVER be changed to some other profile in the name of "fixing" colour issues.

Now for everything to work properly an application needs to be able to read the working profile in the image, interface with the Windows Colour Management system and ask for the display profile, but then it is actually up to the application itself to do the colour conversion. This is why most programs out there are NOT fully colour managed. Photoshop however is: So do the following steps:

1. You've already checked in windows colour management that the monitor profile is the one created by the spyder 4 right?
2. In photoshop click edit -> colour settings. Now set RGB to sRGB (default). This only applies to new files anyway. If you open a RAW file at the bottom of the CameraRAW window is where you select the colour profile, and when you open any file in photoshop it will assume the file's embedded profile as the working profile.
3. In the same colour settings window check to see if Photoshop correctly read the windows display profile. To do this click the down arrow next to RGB colour spaces and look for "Monitor RGB" It should have some text after it with the name of the colour profile. If it says "Monitor RGB - sRGB" or (worse still) "Monitor RGB - AdobeRGB" then something has gone wrong and Photoshop does not recognise you have calibrated the screen.

That's it. From this point on trust photoshop and only photoshop to give you the correct colours. But there's a few things to note in colour management.

1. Never use Edit > Assign Profile. This option exists for recovering something that has gone horribly wrong. You should never "assign" a profile. Only ever "convert".
2. Any image you intend to share with someone save in sRGB. Either do that in the Save For Web and Devices dialogue or use the "Edit > Convert to Profile" option in photoshop.
3. If setup as above, trust photoshop. Internet explorer and other programs may give you kinda crazy different results. If you want other programs to be aware of monitor profiles then you need to find some. Firefox is and there's a plugin to help set it up. Ifranview also has colour management options though I haven't played with them.
4. If your image looks desaturated in programs other than photoshop, then the likely cause is that the image has a working profile that is not sRGB and the program is not aware of this / can't colour manage.
5. If your image looks oversaturated in programs other than photoshop, and you have a wide gamut monitor the likely cause is the program hasn't read the monitor profile.

Welcome to colour management. Here's a picture opened up in a few programs on my machine: