problems with picasaweb and colors

[jnev]

I've been using Picasaweb to host my pictures for a while, and lately I've been noticing how horrible the colors are in the pictures compared to the way they look on my monitor at home. You guys can see for yourselves, my gallery is in the link in my signature. Now, I've heard about colorspaces and whatnot, but I still don't quite understand them and how they work. Do my pictures look bad on Picasaweb because I'm using the wrong colorspace or what? What would a better website be to host my pictures?

thanks!

[jnev]

can anyone help me?

[ibdb]

Yes, it's probably a color space issue. Web browsers aren't color managed applications, and neither is Picasa. Think of color spaces as a recipe for how to display the colors of your pictures -- if you use a format with a non-sRGB color space (sRGB is how web browsers assume all colors are supposed to be interpreted), all those instructions on exactly how to interpret colors are ignored because the application doesn't how to follow the recipe.

If you process your photos in sRGB, there's no need for a special ICC profile (the color recipe). You can continue to use Picasaweb -- switching won't gain you anything, since whereever you go, all web browsers will still work only in sRGB.

Make sense?

[jnev]

I think so... so what you're saying is that when I edit all my pictures in CS3 (when my colorspace is Adobe RGB 1998) and then save them as JPGs I should convert the colorspace to sRGB and then upload them?

[jnev]

wow, I tried that out and the pictures look SO much better. thanks so much!!

[ibdb]

Glad to help!

There are reasons for using other color spaces for different things, and a lot of people here who have put out some much better explanations than I did above, but if web display is your end result, sRGB is definitely the way to go.