MichaelDLilly.com

* A little help

Posted on November 28th, 2008 by mdl. Filed under Photos.

Many of you are techs, some of you are photo nuts. Of late I have started having troubles with the photos I’m uploading to the net.

I shoot in raw, adobe rgb, post process in CS3, save as a JPG. On the computer that JPG seems to look fine. When I upload this to flickr or picasa the vibrance of the picture goes away. All of the colors are muted.

Anyone have thoughts? I’m getting frustrated on this one.

***update*** I took roughly the same picture with roughly the same edits in both sRGB and Adobe RGB, and BOTH had the colors screwed up when I uploaded thos pics to flickr.

One thread on flickr suggested unticking all the boxes when you save as jpg, this did not help either.

The below shots, I switched to sRGB, and shot in RAW + JPG mode so it was the exact same capture just saved in both formats on the camera. I did not edit either of them, just saved them both as JPG’s with a quality of 7 so they both had the same compression and degredation levels.

Shot as RAW saved as JPG

Shot as JPG

Here are a few more examples of an upload of the same photo. When I do most of my photo management in Bridge. But this time I imported the pic into iPhoto to see what would happen.

Through Picasa uploader in iPhoto

Uploaded manually via web to Picasa / Exactly the same if through Picasa Uploader app

6 Responses to “A little help”

R. Vissers Says:
November 28th, 2008 at 10:35 pm

You gotta get Lightroom….it will change the way you do your workflow, and keep you out of CS3 97% of the time.

mlilly Says:
November 28th, 2008 at 10:58 pm

I messed with lightroom when it was in beta… I’m downloading the trial now. A buddy of mine at work uses it, we’ll see… I kinda enjoy Photoshop… I just hate problems I can’t seem to figure out

brett maxwell Says:
November 29th, 2008 at 5:54 am

I agree on getting lightroom, I absolutely love it, but I doubt it will solve your color issue. You didn’t mention what browser you’re using. This definitely sounds like a color-space issue. I don’t know exactly the problem, but I would start googling for “color space [your browser]“. You’ll find stuff like this: http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/04/29/633/

mlilly Says:
November 29th, 2008 at 9:26 am

I installed this color management add-on…
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6891

The pics at the outset look the same. But I will be shooting plenty more today to test with. Hopefully this is it…

rich Says:
December 1st, 2008 at 10:59 am

Friend of Pete here -

I think if you are using photoshop and bridge, you are doing well enough with software.

Color profiles/spaces are a big deal. You will want to follow that advice.

You may also want to buy a color calibration device. I use one whenever I reboot my PC. I use the Pantone Huey. It adjust your monitor based on available light in the room and such.

As far as the first comparison above (shooting as JPG vs shooting in RAW then converting). Realize that The software in your camera does a lot of computations when converting an image into JPG. Photoshop and Iphoto all do these computations when saving as JPG. They don’t all do them the same. It would seem that your camera prefers to boost the saturation when it does these computations.

It is also my belief that Flickr resamples images when they are uploaded. I will never upload a photo to Flickr then use that for printing. I have no proof, but I think that they do not save the actual file that I upload, but their interpretation of the file I uploaded.

mlilly Says:
December 1st, 2008 at 11:05 am

Rich,

I appreciate the feed back! iPhoto didn’t actually do the conversion. I took the pick from bridge after my post processing, imported it into iPhoto (already a JPG), then uploaded from iPhoto to Picasa, and the photo looked different than if I had uploaded it manually.

Regardless, after installing the color management add on the colors are close enough that I am content for online photo sharing purposes.

Thanks again for all the help guys!

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