SNATH From United States of America, joined Mar 2004, 3192 posts, RR: 32 Posted (3 years 1 month 1 day 2 hours ago) and read 4508 times:
OK, I know you'll think I've gone mad... I tried to add a couple of shots to my profile to ask for pre-screening advice. However, I was very surprised to notice that when I viewed the shots on my browser (Firefox, in my case), their colors looked different compared to what I saw when I viewed them in Photoshop (CS4).
I tried with the exactly the same file (i.e., the local copy of one of the jpgs) and, side-by-side, the Photoshop version looks a bit brighter and more vibrant.
SFO2SVO From United States of America, joined Jan 2004, 389 posts, RR: 1 Reply 2, posted (3 years 1 month 1 day 2 hours ago) and read 4498 times:
Probably has to do with colour profiles.
My guess is (I am not on Windows), PS is using the profile set in the image, FF defaults to whatever is default.
Make sure you are uploading with profile set to sRGB.
Silver1SWA From United States of America, joined Mar 2004, 4041 posts, RR: 31 Reply 4, posted (3 years 1 month 1 day 2 hours ago) and read 4492 times:
There was a lengthy discussion recently about another users frustrations with the same issue, except on his Mac. I believe it is related to color profiles.
ALL views, opinions expressed are mine ONLY and are NOT representative of those shared by Southwest Airlines Co.
Hey guys. Thanks, it was indeed the color profile. I changed the settings in Lightroom to use sRGB, instead of ProPhoto RGB, when exporting to CS4 and this resolved the issue. However, do I miss any quality by using sRGB, instead of ProPhoto RGB? Is it possible / desirable to do the conversion in CS4 after editing and before I export to JPG?
Thanks again and apologies for the dumb questions.
Tony
Nikon: we don't want more pixels, we want better pixels.
Klemmi85 From Germany, joined Mar 2009, 196 posts, RR: 0 Reply 7, posted (3 years 1 month 20 hours ago) and read 4437 times:
Quoting SNATH (Reply 6): However, do I miss any quality by using sRGB, instead of ProPhoto RGB?
You do (well, at least in theory but.... just read). I'll try to explain this. The ProPhotoRGB colorspace is larger than the sRGB colorspace, especially the green and blue range. So if you convert from ProPhotoRGB to sRGB you throw away color information. You can avert this by choosing Lightroom to export in sRGB right away, so everything you do in postprocessing is made in a colorspace which is widely used. That gets us the next problem....
Colorspace... By default most applications (especially browsers) display everything with the sRGB profile. If you save your picture in sRGB it won't get you into any trouble. BUT... if you have your picture with a ProPhotoRGB profile things get complicated. Let's take your picture for example:
The water has many shades of blue including light blue, dark blue and many shades in between. Photoshop displays the image in a correct way to you because it reads the profile and knows how to simulate colors to display them correct. Most displays are only capable of displaying everthing in sRGB. So no matter which profile you choose, Photoshop simulates the colors to match the sRGB colors on your screen to make the picture look right.
(This is confusing, I know )
However, as soon as you save your image including the ProPhotoRGB, you encounter problems. Internetexplorer for example cannot read color profiles. So even you have the ProPhotoRGB embedded into your picture, IE does not care, it will simply "apply" the sRGB profile to the picture. The bad thing is, IE doesn't "convert" the colors to "simulate" the right sRGB colors, IE will cut everything down to the smaller sRGB colorspace.
That means: Taken your water for example, it has as I said above, many different shades of blue. When IE "converts" your picture into sRGB a considerable amount of blue color information will be thrown away which makes the water look "flat" and not as vibrant as it used to. Same happens to all other colors as well. In general, cutting the colorspace as browsers do is far different from what Photoshop does.
Photoshop simulates the colors, so they display correct on your sRGB screen, IE and others simply cut the colorspace down to sRGB and color information is lost. That's the whole problem.
Currently only Safari supports color profiles by default. Firefox (only version 3) can handle profiles, too but they need to be activated. You can do this by typing "about:config" into your Firefox adress bar and search for "gfx.color_management.enabled" and set it to "true". But except for those two, the color profile handling in browsers is quite bad.
So how to save in Photoshop?
Well, it's simple. Just do the postprocessing you want to do as usual. But instead of the normal "save as" dialog you need to choose the "save for web and deviced" dialog which brings up all the options you need for your image. You can choose whether to save it as a GIF, JPEG oder PNG. You should choose JPEG then and enter your desired quality from 0 (worst) to 100 (best). I choose 90% mostly as it's perfectly fine for internet use.
Now the important thing:
To make the picture look as desired, you need to check the "convert to sRGB" checkbox in the dialog. I provide a picture how it looks in my PS (german version):
With doing that your colors are converted to sRGB and every programm will display it correctly.
Quoting SNATH (Reply 6): Is it possible / desirable to do the conversion in CS4 after editing and before I export to JPG?
I would export from Lightroom in sRGB 8bit, do the postprocessing and save it as mentioned before. This way you won't encounter any problems at all as you stop from using different profiles in your workflow.
Quoting SNATH (Reply 6): Thanks again and apologies for the dumb questions.
Oh, there are no dumb questions
Color management is a very difficult topic with all them profiles, colorspaces and stuff like that. I have to deal with these problems every day and it becomes even worse if your client wants to print that picture, so you have to convert to CMYK colorspace which is even smaller than sRGB, so it's even more color information thrown away, especially those vibrant colors. You have to do lot of tweaks and tricks then to get your desired output.
If there's anything more you want to know, feel free to ask.
Kukkudrill From Malta, joined Dec 2004, 1108 posts, RR: 6 Reply 8, posted (3 years 1 month 19 hours ago) and read 4422 times:
Quoting Klemmi85 (Reply 7): I would export from Lightroom in sRGB 8bit, do the postprocessing and save it as mentioned before. This way you won't encounter any problems at all as you stop from using different profiles in your workflow.
My advice would be to keep an edited but unresized and unsharpened TIFF or PSD file in ProPhoto or Adobe RGB. Then make a separate copy, resize and sharpen this one and convert the colour space to sRGB to upload it to a.net.
The reason is so as to keep your options open should somebody want to publish your photo in print at some stage in the future. While, as Klemmi says, photos need to be converted to CMYK for printing, my understanding is that the conversion process is printer-specific and many publishers would prefer to do it themselves. However, within the printing industry Adobe RGB is apparently regarded as the best base from which to convert to CMYK and has become the industry standard. I'm not sure why, but I suspect that whereas CMYK cannot handle a lot of colour intensity (saturation) because it simulates 4-colour rendition by ink, it contains a wider range of shades of colour than sRGB. If that makes sense.
You can of course convert sRGB back to Adobe RGB but it would be pulling the wool over the publisher's eyes - you can't get back the lost colour information. (I believe it's ok to convert from ProPhoto to Adobe RGB for printing purposes because ProPhoto has a wider colour gamut.)
[Edited 2009-04-22 03:29:42]
Make the most of the available light ... a lesson of photography that applies to life
Klemmi85 From Germany, joined Mar 2009, 196 posts, RR: 0 Reply 9, posted (3 years 1 month 17 hours ago) and read 4409 times:
Quoting Kukkudrill (Reply 8): My advice would be to keep an edited but unresized and unsharpened TIFF or PSD file in ProPhoto or Adobe RGB. Then make a separate copy, resize and sharpen this one and convert the colour space to sRGB to upload it to a.net.
That's what Lightroom does per default. It's always non-destructive as your original RAW file stays the way it came out of the camera. As soon as you edit the picture, it makes a copy to work with. So no need for seperate copies here.
So there's no sense in converting it to AdobeRGB or PhotoRGB before as you have to convert it to sRGB anyways if you're using it on a.net for example. I learned not to mess up your workflow with too many profiles and colorspaces as you can do severe damage to your output file with this. Better focus on what you want to do with the picture and then choose ONE colorspace / profile you work with. As stated, for any other use, the original image is kept untouched by Lightroom.
Quoting Kukkudrill (Reply 8): The reason is so as to keep your options open should somebody want to publish your photo in print at some stage in the future. While, as Klemmi says, photos need to be converted to CMYK for printing, my understanding is that the conversion process is printer-specific and many publishers would prefer to do it themselves.
As stated, for later use, he can always get back to the original image.
For CMYK conversion:
You are right, most publishers prefer to do it themselves BUT I won't let them, there's a simple reason for that... I don't want any publisher nor RIP - Software to choose how the colors of my photo shall be altered. That is my job to do as a photographer and designer. So what they CAN do is to send me their used profile (most of em do that) so that I can edit and convert the picture as needed to get the best possible result. Doing so, I have full control about what happens to the picture.
Before I got into colormanagement I had much trouble with the right reproduction of colors on prints, simply as every publisher/printer did his own treatment to the picture with his own profiles. The way I work today, that problem has gone.
But, you are right, as it comes to printing, the AdobeRGB colorspace is better than sRGB since it is a bit larger and covers some colorinformation which are useful for printing and missing in sRGB. sRGB as stated, is best for screen use, AdobeRGB for printing, that's right.
To put it in a nutshell, if you're about to use it for the web / screen only, just follow the procedure I explained before, if you're about to have a picture printed and don't do the CMYK conversion process yourself with the publisher/printer profiles supplied, choose AdobeRGB over sRGB.
Quoting Kukkudrill (Reply 8): I'm not sure why, but I suspect that whereas CMYK cannot handle a lot of colour intensity
That's basically right as CMYK cannot produce these bright and vibrant colors due to the fact that light is absorbed by the ink. That's why it is called a subtractive color system as it subtracts the amount of light whereas RGB is additive color systems, the more light you add, the more bright and vibrant it becomes until it becomes totally white whereas all 4 colors of CMYK printed on top gives you total light absorbtion, leading to black.
The one system works with reflected light only, so it suffers a loss of light due to absorbtion, the other one adds light.
Quoting Kukkudrill (Reply 8): because it simulates 4-colour rendition by ink, it contains a wider range of shades of colour than sRGB
CMYK does NOT have a wider range of color, it's certainly smaller. Especially colors like turquoise and bright orange which are perfectly fine on a sRGB screen will not be reproduced on a print the way it's displayed on the screen. These colors tend to look more grey than as vibrant as on a screen. You have only a limited amount of printable colors compared to sRGB.
The difference between sRGB and AdobeRGB is, that the AdobeRGB colorspace is more optimized for printing because it shifts its colorrange a bit to be closer to RGB when converted into CMYK but the printed result is still far away from the range of RGB in general. Of course you will need a good RIP software then, which can take advantage from pictures including an AdobeRGB profile.
Quoting Kukkudrill (Reply 8): You can of course convert sRGB back to Adobe RGB but it would be pulling the wool over the publisher's eyes - you can't get back the lost colour information. (I believe it's ok to convert from ProPhoto to Adobe RGB for printing purposes because no colour information gets lost.)
Yes and no. First of all you're right, converting sRGB to AdobeRGB doesn't get you any benefit as color information has already been destroyed.
On the other hand, you really have to be careful when handling with profiles. First of all, the ProPhotoRGB is even larger than AdobeRGB and when working with a garmut that large, you would even need to work in 16bit mode not just in 8bit. The second thing is, that it's quite useless for a normal user to work with these profiles as your normal sRGB screen can't display the amount of shades in color anyways.
What it is good for is raw development and editing. Why that? Well thats simple, most RAW files have 12Bit color information. If you're doing development or post processing in 8Bit, you already removed some shades of color. That doesn't matter normally as for web use it's still perfectly fine but when doing professional postprocessing or retouching it's better to work in a color range as large as possible to prevent details from being destroyed. This can happen pretty fast for example if you push gradation. It's better then to have more nuances to play with than just a few wich can clip pretty easy if you're not careful.
Hope you could use this information. It's pretty technical but as I already said, the color topic is extremely complicated
Many thanks for the detailed information. The only bit where I would continue to differ with you concerns the production of an edited but unresized file. You are of course right that the raw file remains untouched, but I still prefer to keep an unresized edited TIFF so that if I need it I don't have to re-edit the original. Eliminating dust spots can take time, and so can rotation to level the horizon (I often make several attempts at this till I'm satisfied) so I would rather do it once only. Indeed, for me producing an edited unresized image has come to be the main output of my editing, whereas I resize for a.net (when I upload, which is less often these days) as an afterthought.
Make the most of the available light ... a lesson of photography that applies to life
Klemmi85 From Germany, joined Mar 2009, 196 posts, RR: 0 Reply 11, posted (3 years 1 month 16 hours ago) and read 4394 times:
Quoting Kukkudrill (Reply 10): Many thanks for the detailed information. The only bit where I would continue to differ with you concerns the production of an edited but unresized file. You are of course right that the raw file remains untouched, but I still prefer to keep an unresized edited TIFF so that if I need it I don't have to re-edit the original. Eliminating dust spots can take time, and so can rotation to level the horizon (I often make several attempts at this till I'm satisfied) so I would rather do it once only. Indeed, for me producing an edited unresized image has come to be the main output of my editing, whereas I resize for a.net (when I upload, which is less often these days) as an afterthought.
I see your point here, maybe I didn't explain it good enough what I meant. Are you familiar how Lightroom works? If not, take this as an information and explantion what I mean, otherwise just excuse me having gotten you wrong
Lets start here....
You load your picture from your camera into lightroom. At this point you have your file physically on your harddrive and in the LR library. I would align the horizon then in Lightroom and remove the dust in LR, too.
By doing so, I do NOT modify the original file. Lightroom creates a small file with information about what I modified in the picture. It does NOT write it into the original RAW file, the small "modifier-file" is realtime blended onto the original only. That way, you have your original RAW file in the background with the modifier file on top. So if I cropped the image for example, it shows in Lightroom the way I cropped it but only because of the modifer file on top of the original. I can always edit the crop as the original file was never touched.
That way I can have edited images, ready to use, in Lightroom without ever touching the original RAW data and producing a second image which takes up extra space on my harddrive for example. Another thing is, though I always have the RAW file and no TIFF, I can always change whitebalance after it without the danger to ruin nuances in the picture when it was "hard-written" into da TIFF file before. Clean changes in whitebalance are a problem then.
What I'm trying to say is that you're basically right with what you say IF you DON'T use lightroom. The creation of digital copies without the need to produce a physical file but having an edited image though is an advantage the thread opener can use without problems.
I can't explain it any better. I'll try to summarize in my own words, maybe it's clear then
You state, that you take the original file, do your basic cropping, alining and dust removing, no sharpening or anything else. Done that, you save it as a TIFF file as the "new-original" file to work with, right?
I say, as the TO uses Lightroom, he doesn't need to do that. He takes his file, makes the same modifications as you do but doesn't need to save a seperate TIFF as the small modifier file from Lightroom displays the original image in the edited way whithout a second image as a physical file. As soon as he exports it to Photoshop, the modification he did is automatically applied to the picture as Lightroom hands over the file as a TIFF or PSD image itself. So only when you export your digital copy a physical file is created but again, the original RAW is never touched. In his case taking the original, modify, save as tiff and then export would in this case even create two TIFFs or one TIFF and one PSD which are absolutely equal.
Hope you got what I mean. I don't want to tell you how to do your picture management, hell no, sorry if I sounded that way, I was just always referring to the practical benefit of the thread opener and in HIS case, I think it's working best the way I described. Your approach ain't false of course, I would do the same if I wasn't using LR.
Kukkudrill From Malta, joined Dec 2004, 1108 posts, RR: 6 Reply 12, posted (3 years 1 month 11 hours ago) and read 4367 times:
I see your point. No, I wasn't familiar with Lightroom as I use Photoshop Elements. But I've often heard people raving about Lightroom and I've wondered what's so special about it ... now I know
Make the most of the available light ... a lesson of photography that applies to life
Klemmi85 From Germany, joined Mar 2009, 196 posts, RR: 0 Reply 13, posted (3 years 1 month 11 hours ago) and read 4364 times:
Quoting Kukkudrill (Reply 12): I see your point. No, I wasn't familiar with Lightroom as I use Photoshop Elements. But I've often heard people raving about Lightroom and I've wondered what's so special about it ... now I know Smile
Aah okay So everyone's happy now Good
Maybe you should give Lightroom a try, a 30 day trial version should be available through Adobe. I think that's long enough to infect you
Silver1SWA From United States of America, joined Mar 2004, 4041 posts, RR: 31 Reply 15, posted (3 years 1 month 7 hours ago) and read 4342 times:
Quoting Klemmi85 (Reply 9): First of all you're right, converting sRGB to AdobeRGB doesn't get you any benefit as color information has already been destroyed.
This is all very interesting, but very confusing to someone like me without experience with print and color management. I guess my main question right now is, what color profile should I have my camera set to if I'm shooting primarily in RAW? With a RAW does it matter? Or if I'm shooting RAW with camera set to sRGB will that color information still be lost losing any benefit from converting to another color profile for print?
ALL views, opinions expressed are mine ONLY and are NOT representative of those shared by Southwest Airlines Co.
Klemmi85 From Germany, joined Mar 2009, 196 posts, RR: 0 Reply 16, posted (3 years 1 month 1 hour ago) and read 4322 times:
Quoting Silver1SWA (Reply 15): I guess my main question right now is, what color profile should I have my camera set to if I'm shooting primarily in RAW? With a RAW does it matter?
Doesn't matter. The RAW always has the same color information. It's only about what you're doing with it when you load it into Photoshop for example and if you shoot in JPEG mode.
If you switch from sRGB to AdobeRGB, your camera will write this preference into the RAW file. When you load the picture from the camera, the raw converter uses this information to apply the AdobeRGB profile to it but that has no effect on the original file itself.
If you shoot JPEG, the camera applies the choosen profile directly.
Quoting Silver1SWA (Reply 15): Or if I'm shooting RAW with camera set to sRGB will that color information still be lost losing any benefit from converting to another color profile for print?
No. As stated above, the RAW has every color information the camera sensor physically delivers.
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