Help with color management

[Sorry for the long post, cliffs at the bottom]

I'm having an issue with color management, and I don't know if it's my imagination or my hardware setup or what.

For now, the vast majority of my work is web only. At my current skill level, I just want to stick to sRGB and have it work and be consistent.

For most of my work, my current workflow is as follows:
Shoot with Canon 60D, raw+jpeg, color space in the camera is set to sRGB (don't know if that setting affects the raw files or just the jpegs)
Import raws into Lightroom 3.4 for editing
Publish from Lightroom to jpegs on hard drive, or publish directly to Flickr or Facebook. When there is an option to do so (e.g. exporting to hard drive), I choose sRGB. There's no color space selection for publishing directly from LR3 to Flickr, which I find a little odd.

PROBLEM: when viewing my published images on Flickr, they look very de-saturated and the tones are not quite correct.

Until tonight, when I finally started to diagnose, I thought the problem was in uploading directly from LR3 to Flickr. But I found that the images look the same if I export from LR3 to desktop WITH THE sRGB BOX CHECKED, then upload to Flickr. I figured that should embed the color profile and resolve any issues, but it didn't seem to help.

Then I found that the images look fine when viewed in Finder.
Then I found that the images look fine viewed in Safari! even the ones that I published directly from Flickr without explicitly selecting the sRGB color space.

I'm using a MacbookPro1,1 with OS X 10.6.7. I have not intentionally adjusted any of the laptop display settings since doing a full wipe and reinstall a few months ago.

I realize that Chrome does not support color management (for shame!!). But I would not have expected a sRBG image to look SO different in a non-color-managed app.

Experts, what am I missing?

Here are some sample images, to me they all look equally crappy in Chrome, the two Flickr ones look identically good in Safari but the Photobucket one is kinda mediocre, though I blame Photobucket for that.

Uploaded directly from LR3 to Flickr, no color space explicitly selected during export:

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/nathancarter/5​723534749/

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/nathancarter/5​735140443/

HTTP response: 403 | MIME changed to 'text/html' | Byte size: ZERO | PHOTOBUCKET ERROR IMAGE

That second picture looks significantly lighter than the first, on her forehead. Something weird's going on.

Some web browers are color managed, some are not. The Mac OS browser is probably color managed.

Put a jpeg onto a web server and post a link, not via an image sharing service, they mess with things.

That's strange.
Both first images look the same here (except they don't align exactly), and both have sRGB embedded.
Photobucket image does not have an embedded profile, so might look different in some browsers. (Safari, FF4 at default). It's also significantly less sharpened.

A non colormanaged application (such as Chrome) will always show an image a bit different, even if it's sRGB.

Nathan
Pics 1 & 2 look identical on my Mac using color managed Firefox 4
there's a good tutorial on CM in browsers and stuff here:
http://www.gballard.ne​t …embeddedJPEGpro​files.html
A bit daunting but worth the effort.
I would have guessed that LR's export to Flickr preset applies sRGB "under the hood" as part of the preparation for export.
BTW your in-camera color space setting makes no difference to RAW files.
Tim

I was at work on an office PC, probably with color management turned off. I'm at home on a photography PC now, with color management turned on. Both images appear to be sRgb and look identical on my home monitor.

tim wrote in post #12443740
That second picture looks significantly lighter than the first, on her forehead. Something weird's going on.

René Damkot wrote in post #12444675
That's strange.
Both first images look the same here (except they don't align exactly), and both have sRGB embedded.

When I'm veiwing the images here the second image looks lighter. However, if I click the links and have them each in a new tab, they both look the same (except for the slight alignment miss). FF4.0.1.

It's simple logic that LR is applying sRGB in the Publish function. It is, after all, uploading rendered RGB images, not RAW data, and as such it has to be in some color space. Knowing that the images are bound for the web, what other logical choice would LR's designers make?

If sRGB images look flat in Chrome (and presumably would look the same in IE) you must have a monitor with a very narrow gamut, narrower than sRGB, although I would have expected more of a MBP. It may be time to start thinking about an external monitor.

Thanks for all the comments and discussion.

I find it extremely odd that some of you say that the two Flickr images don't "align." It's the same image, I didn't do any additional cropping or anything - the only difference is in the exporting.

I did notice that due to viewing angle on my laptop monitor, the images' saturation/tones will change slightly as you scroll up and down, so it's tough to compare them when they are stacked vertically in this thread. So, for those of you who are seeing something different between the first two images (Flickr), will you do me a favor and click through to my Flickr page, go into the Lightbox, and flip back-and-forth between "Older" and "Newer" just to make sure they really do look different?

tzalman wrote in post #12445028
It's simple logic that LR is applying sRGB in the Publish function. It is, after all, uploading rendered RGB images, not RAW data, and as such it has to be in some color space. Knowing that the images are bound for the web, what other logical choice would LR's designers make?

That makes sense, it's just a little odd that Lightroom doesn't say anything about it anywhere.

tzalman wrote in post #12445028
If sRGB images look flat in Chrome (and presumably would look the same in IE) you must have a monitor with a very narrow gamut, narrower than sRGB, although I would have expected more of a MBP. It may be time to start thinking about an external monitor.

Hmm, I'm not sure if I follow. I'm using the same monitor for all my applications - Lightroom, Safari, Chrome, Photoshop. If it's a monitor issue, how can it look good in Safari and Lightroom, but bad in Chrome?

I wonder if I can take a screen capture to illustrate the difference that I'm seeing - I'll try that when I get home.

Anyway.
What's my next step? Is there any solution that I can make? From this thread, it seems that I'm not doing anything wrong in my processing and publishing, which is a relief.

Maybe I just accept the fact that my images won't look right in other people's non-color-managed browsers.

Maybe I should quit using Chrome myself. It's disappointing that so many people tout Chrome as the next best thing, when without color management it's useless for photographers and graphic designers, or worse than useless because you know other people are using Chrome, and not seeing your images as you intended them. Switch back to Safari? meh. I quit using Firefox due to (reports of) a severe memory leak - usually it's not bad, but if I don't reboot every day it gets really nasty, which agrees with the possibility of a memory leak.

nathancarter wrote in post #12446370
Maybe I just accept the fact that my images won't look right in other people's non-color-managed browsers.

The fact that someone else doesn't have a color managed browser is their problem not yours.

nathancarter wrote in post #12446370
I quit using Firefox due to (reports of) a severe memory leak - usually it's not bad, but if I don't reboot every day it gets really nasty, which agrees with the possibility of a memory leak.

Have you tried Firefox since the most recent release, v4? They have made some improvements since before this most recent release that have resolved memory leak problems.

On Edit:

What module are you exporting your image from.

"Lightroom automatically exports images in the Slideshow and Web modules using the sRGB profile so that the color looks good on the majority of computer monitors".
http://livedocs.adobe.​com …eb-B3D3-9D6256B8917D.html

I'm exporting from the Library module. When exporting to the hard drive, I usually right click on the image(s), choose "Export", and follow the prompts. When publishing to Flickr, I send them directly to the Flickr Publish collection. I have not used the Web or Slideshow modules.


The URL for that help file says ".../Lightroom/1.0/...​" so it might not be relevant to LR3. there's a separate set of docs for LR3 - I haven't perused them yet.
http://help.adobe.com …69-A598-04C7F769FFA0.html

[edit] Well, the LR3 document has the exact same language about the Web and Slideshow modules as the LR1.0 document. Wonder if that's just an oversight, I'll keep digging.

[edit2] There are comments at the bottom of the document I linked that go into some more specific detail. Thanks tkerr for pointing me in the right direction.

nathancarter wrote in post #12447784
Interesting - though the URL for that help file says ".../Lightroom/1.0/...​" so it might not be relevant to LR3.

It's still relevant with LR3
http://help.adobe.com …69-A598-04C7F769FFA0.html

D Thompson wrote in post #12444994
if I click the links and have them each in a new tab, they both look the same (except for the slight alignment miss). FF4.0.1.

To clarify: That's what I did, because I was using my laptop (bad viewing angle).

The "ColorTest" image is one pixels less high: Uploaded as (1280 x 853), it got resized to (1024 x 682) and a (640 x 426) "Medium size"

The other was uploaded as a (1024 x 683) and got resized to a (640 x 427) "Medium Size".

You said it yourself, Chrome isn't c.m., the others are.
C.m. is a process in which the image display data, the numbers that represent colors, are remapped to the numbers that will produce the same colors on your screen. Without c.m. the numbers are just shot through without change. When this happens, if the original image is in a space that has a gamut larger than the gamut of the monitor, the image appears flat. Most monitors are close to sRGB so we feed them sRGB and even in Chrome they look "more or less" ok. Give them an Adobe RGB image and it will look flat. And the opposite is also true - run Chrome on a 'wide gamut' monitor and all the sRGB photos will look overly saturated and contrasty. You say sRGB looks flat on your screen, which leads me to suspect that its gamut is significantly smaller than sRGB.

Update: I switched back to Firefox 4.

I miss some of Chrome's features, especially the EXIF viewer that shows EXIF if you hover the mouse over the image. But for my purposes, none of those features are worth anything if it doesn't show color managed images.

nathancarter wrote in post #12510169
Update: I switched back to Firefox 4.

I miss some of Chrome's features, especially the EXIF viewer that shows EXIF if you hover the mouse over the image. But for my purposes, none of those features are worth anything if it doesn't show color managed images.

There are a couple Exif add ons that work quite well with FF.
I use a couple of them.

This one is quite detailed.
https://addons.mozilla​.org …irefox/addon/ex​if-viewer/

And this one gives you just the essential information. I actually prefer this one.
https://addons.mozilla​.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fxif/