Colour issue

Bacchus

Hi,

I've been head wrecked all evening with a problem with photos I've processed in photoshop. Basically, my workflow would be import to Lightroom and edit in Photoshop CS5. It's the same process I've been using for the past few months without problem. Today though, I was processing a few photos and noticed when I viewed them in another photo viewer (or even viewed them after uploading to the web) that the colour appears much less saturated and darker. After much research I've come across the whole area of PhotoPro RGB, Adobe RGB and sRGB. If I convert the photo (once loaded into Photoshop) to sRGB and save it as a jpeg then, it looks fine in other viewers. Problem solved.

BUT, I looked through my older photos and they are all suffering from the same darkness/desaturation!!! Now these are photos that I've uploaded to the web and printed with no problems at all. Why now would they be appearing desaturated?? I can't wrap my head around it. Can anyone clue me in?

stcstc

its because most browsers etc are not colour saavy

so ignore the colourprofiles

every browser however understands sRGB, which is why they look right

Bacchus

In general would you recommend saving sRGB in photoshop? Is there any reason to use Adobe RGB or PhotoPro RGB?

I understand that monitors and browsers cannot display PhotoPro RGB correctly but the thing that really confuses me at the moment is how, photos I processed before with photoshop (and have printed, viewed in other viewers, put online etc.) suddenly have this same darkened, less saturated look?

stcstc

no

sRGB is useful for certain things
as are adobeRGB etc

use sRGB deff for the web

Heebie

What color profile to use depends on what you're doing.

For editing and archiving, I recommend Kodak ProPhoto RGB. It is a much larger color space, and can hold colors that simply don't exist in other color spaces. It's orders of magnitude larger than Adobe 1998 RGB, which is orders of magnitude larger than sRGB.
sRGB is a rather small color space, but most devices can reliably reproduce most of it, giving acceptable results.

When printing, I try and get hold of color profiles for the actual print equipment being used, and do soft-proofing within Photoshop to see just how much color dropout I'm going to get, if any. (Converting to the right color profile will minimise this.)

The reason to work with the enormous color space is to keep from having limits on what colors might exist within the image.

If you want a fun experiment, take a picture that you have in ProPhoto, and go to the dialogue box you would use to convert to another color space, and turn off color management.
This will show you the ACTUAL color values that are encoded in the file with no translation done by color profiling.. and you'll be amazed how awful it looks.

I recommend archiving photos in ProPhoto as well.. as down the road you don't know what you might want to do with them, nor do you know if equipment will exist that can render the full spectrum of ProPhoto, or at least Adobe 1998, or at the very very least something more than is available today.

I've seen the color gamut that can be output by printers increase pretty drastically since I started printing, so there's no reason to assume it won't keep getting better.

----

On to explaining why your colors look so crap.

Kodak Pro Photo, as I said is a HUGE color space, and contains a lot of colors that simply don't exist in sRGB. If you had saved them all in Adobe 1998, you would see a similar problem, but not as drastic, because although Adobe 1998 is much larger than sRGB, it's still nowhere near as large as ProPhoto.

Any colors that are outside of the gamut of a particular color space, will either come out wrong, or disappear entirely, because the equipment trying to render the color is simply incapable of reproducing the colors they're being asked to reproduce. (The soft proofing mentioned above simulates this on-screen for you., and you can tell it to show you any colors that are outside of the destination gamut in whatever color you wish, although the default is red.)