Why the $^%#! are my images looking so RED on Facebook?

C.Steele wrote in post #9141362
Ok, so I looked at another photographers blog that had the same images on his blog and FB - they looked identical to me (and color correct I might add). So it really seems like it is something with MY images, and I can't figure it out. Keep in mind also that this is a new thing. I posted images from other shoots months ago and never had an issue, everything looked correct.

I'm leaning more and more toward a complete HD wipe and reinstall of all my programs.

In my awkward way that is what I was trying to say. I think it is your image. The red channel info in PS is kind of high compared to the other channels. They look red to me everywhere. Your blog, and both that you posted. They are red to me in PS and both IE and Firefox.

Ok, I reread the enitre thread and noticed I had been a bit too quick in my conclusions, or rather I did not get the whole picture. You are in fact using a color managed browser, so you should normally not see a color shift of an image with a sRGB color profile embedded.
Then the only option that remains is that FB is actually changing your image file, and in the process the color space info is stripped off. If the color space info is missing, even a color managed application will send the image data straight to the monitor without any color correction. In that case the image will look approximately correct on a sRGB monitor and incorrect on a wide gamut monitor.
A qucik search on Google will find several statements that says that FB is not displaying the original image, and in the process of converting the image it strips all metadata off, including the embedded color profile. That would explain everything.
Please note that the difference will only be visible on a monitor with a color space that is significantly different from sRGB, which is the case for your monitor. For users with sRGB monitors your image will look more like the original.

Have a read here on how the "Save for web" preview works.
http://www.getcolorman​aged.com/color-management/saveforweb/

You are using FF 3.5 at default settings. If an image does not have an embedded profile, it'll assume monitorRGB (Which is stupid. Safari works the same)

I assume, like Jens says, Facebook strips the sRGB profile.

Either live with it, or set FF to fully color manage.

*Update*

Jens and Rene were right on the money! The before and after discrepancy I was seeing in PS was due to the "original" preview showing what the image would look like on MY monitor in a non-color managed app. Since my monitor is a wide gamut monitor the colors look way off and overly red when they aren't color managed, just as Jens said.

The second piece was the FB problem. FB does indeed strip ALL metadata from an image including the profile. As Rene said Firefox (and some other browsers) assign a monitor profile when there is no tag present (instead of sRGB). This is why I was seeing on FB exactly what I was seeing in the PS "before" preview. Basically a non-color managed image on a wide gamut monitor which = yuck.

The final piece (and fix) was to get THIS ADD ON for Firefox and set it to "Enable color management for - All images" in stead of the default Firefox setting of "...- only images with ICC tags." After I changed this setting I restarted FF and went directly to FB to see if it made a difference. Bingo! Now everything from FB to blog to Windows viewer looks identical for me. Yay!

So in the end Firefox and a wide gamut monitor were the culprits. I'm really happy to have figured this out and know that my clients aren't seeing crappy images on FB and passing them around (unless of course they have a wide gamut monitor).

Thank you all so much for sticking with this thread and helping me figure this out. This has been driving me crazy for quite a while and I couldn't have figured it out without the help from all of you.

Take care
Chris

The add-on is easiest, but you can also type "About:config" (without quotes) in the FF adress bar, promise to be careful, then type in "gfx" and set gfx-colormanagement.mode (or whatever the exact wording is) to "1"
"0" is "off", Default is "2"

And just as a final note - after re-calibrating my monitor as part of this mess and taking another good look at that image....I think it was too red regardless of all the other crap going on I remember pushin the magentas up to highlight the sky but I think I forgot to mask it off their faces. Oops!

Anyway, here it is one last time with the red masked off their faces a bit. Hopefully this looks better to some of you. Keep in mind is was below 0 out there so there is no way around some of that red. But their overall skin tones look better.

Thanks again!

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It does look some better.I still think it looks to warm. One thing that I think makes it a little off is that the skin tones are so warm compared to the coolness of the rest of the scene. did you use a gold reflector or process the skin warmer? When I checked the photo info in PS on the original photo it was 45% magenta, 41% yellow and almost no blue. Given the coolness of the rest of the photo you would expect there to be more blue. I was convinced all along that it was the photo.

When I sampled the forehead of the original image this was the color when I input the numbers. His skin looks fine to me now. He has a red nose but you expect that with the cold. She still looks too warm. See how yellow the teeth are? But it is much better.

Right you are, but there is a reason for that. This is what was behind me lighting their faces. No gold reflector required

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Ah hah. That explains it.