I'm very, VERY new to the concept of file manipulation & transfer. I just discovered this problem and it's pretty nasty. I'm hoping someone can at least point me to a website or book that will explain how to deal with it:
I never had a problem with my old P&S camera, but with my current system I'm seeing a MASSIVE change in picture quality (exposure, contrast, saturation) when viewing my Mac-made files on a pc. Here's the details:
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I shoot a Canon 5D, always in raw. I convert the raw files to TIFF with Optics Pro.
I tweak my images in the Mac, using Leopard-Preview, or CS2, then eventually save dthem as jpegs. (set to highest quality)
I want to send large bunches of them to friends, on cd's or dvd's. Very few of the people I will send them to are into photography, so they will likely just double-click the pics to view them. Most will have pc's, not Macs, and so (I assume) will use the stock "Windows Picture Viewer" application.
I just made a data DVD for a friend, and when I opened the files on my pc, all the pics look massively over-exposed, oversaturated, and heavily contrasted. This is WAY more than what could be attributed to a non-calibrated monitor.
Is this normal? (As I said, I never had a problem before with my old P&S camera)
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One possibility:
Could it be due to my just having installed Leopard on my Mac? Not coincidentally, ever since Leopard, my pics also print badly, and in "sort of" the same way: Not over-exposed, but over-saturated to an absurd degree. - But that's some kind of print-driver issue. I'm only mentioning it in case Leopard might be causing OTHER issues. -but what?
I'm rather desperate here !!!!!!! I also need to send pics as promotional material for my (non-photog) business so this is costing me serious money.
how did you save the JPEG files? did you embed profiles or is it using sRGB? MS photo viewer is not a color managed application so if you have profiles embedded you may want to remove them and just leave sRGB attached.
I don't even know what that means. I have no idea where to even start learning about this stuff.
I've got the camera-lens-lighting thing down really well, taking great shots & in full control. -but then it all turns to some sort of techno nightmare.
Right now I just need to get through this one, serious hurdle.
I never even THOUGHT about profiles. That's something I equate with printing, and probably has something to do with my problems printing under Leopard. (even though I have the lastest Epson profiles, not that I know what that means...)
I tried re-burning the jpegs using the Mac's built-in burn feature, instead of Toast, and they look exactly the same. I tried two PC's and a windows laptop, and all look pretty much the same. On the two new machines, the saturation is a little better, but the exposure is even MORE blown out.
It's really, REALLY bad.
I'm just lost here.
Assuming you are correct:
What would cause a profile to be embedded with the jpegs, and how do I remove it?
The first step to color management is to calibrate your monitor with a colorimeter.
The Mac defaults to a gamma setting of 1.8, you should change it to 2.2 as it is now accepted as the standard for both platforms.
Adobe RGB provides a wider color space than sRGB and unless viewed from a color aware application such as Photoshop, Safari or Firefox3, will appear washed out in applications that assume an sRGB color space.
This article will help to understand color management with a Mac:
It is likely a combination of using Adobe RGB and non calibrated monitors. The differences you see are entirely possibly due to the different screen profiles. The ONLY way to evaluate color, saturation, and contrast is on a quality monitor that has been profiled with a hardware deveice (colorimeter).
Read the "Workflow Guidelines" link at the top of this page. It's a good intro to color spaces.
You basically are having the problem that you seem to have ColorSync set to a low gamma setting, as Jerry noted, and your images are being saved in "Adobe RGB" color space. For editing, that's fine (better really) but for viewing on Windows Viewer and other non-pro-photo programs, sRGB is what you want. Your old P&S camera only shot in sRGB, so you never had this problem.
Go into System Preferences, Displays, Color tab, Claibrate... and do that, it'll get you closer than nothing. Make sure the gamma is set to 2.2. Choosing the "sRGB" option in your program and working in that from the beginning is easiest and will keep your pics looking correct anywhere until you get a handle on color management. There are a number of good books, or just hang here for a while.
Last week one of the docs I work for said she needed a portrait for a program she was teaching in. The organizers wanted TIF files, so that is what I sent, the doc wanted to see the files, I was busy so I just shrunk the and jpeged the images and sent them to her, for getting sRGB. I was walking by her work area later and asked her how she liked the pic. She said they were fine, one was on her scene and yuck the skin color was awful. Did a dope slap but was just happy about folks that weren't color aware.
I primarily shoot RAW. My camera is set to Adobe RGB. My Adobe Photoshop CS3 working colour space is set to Adobe RGB. I decided on the Adobe RGB colour space because it larger than sRGB. When preparing images for my website, I have a CS3 action which resizes the image to 700 pixels on the long side and converts the colour to sRGB.
As Jerry wrote, you really do need to calibrate both your systems to Gamma 2.2 to ensure consistency in the images across platforms.
Bear in mind that sRGB even on a calibrated monitor and not in a color managed application will look bad on a wide gamut monitor. If you have a wide gamut monitor and your friends do not they will actually get a better version than you see yourself. Wide gamut monitors NEED color managed application at all times.
For what its worth:
Both images look identical on my calibrated monitor (Eye One Display 2) with Internet Explore on my PC.
You will, in time, fully understand color management - on either a Mac or PC. Picking a platform will not make anyone mysteriously understand color on computers.
You may find reading Andrew Rodney's color management book, "Color Management for Photographers" a great start. Although not simple at first, it really does make perfect sense afterwards.
jerryrock wrote:
Both images look identical on my calibrated monitor with FireFox 3 and Safari on my Mac.
Color aware browsers like Safari will assume sRGB for an image without an embedded color space.
How the heck can this be? I am ALSO looking at them, in this thread, on a Mac via Safari, and they look glaringly different!
This is starting to make me insane....
BTW - the reason for the size difference: In CS2, when you choose "embed the profile" you get much smaller choice of sizes. The next notch up put it over the FM Forums 350K limit, so I had to male it around 250K. When you use the "save for web" command, the dliniations a much finer, and I was able to choose just-under 350K.
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Anyway-
I guess the answer to my "problem" is simply to always embed the profile.
-But I thought I was, when I did the conversion from RAW to TIFF. If my TIFF file has sRGB embedded, shouldn't the jpegs made in CS2 also be embedded, unless I specifically tell CS2 to strip it out?
OK - compared images on two tabs so I could switch from one other to the other to check any differences. Did this in each of three browsers.
For me on a wide gamut calibrated monitor:
Firefox 3 they look identical
IE they look identical
Safari bottom image is brighter and over saturated
Take of that what you will. You would I believe get different results on a different monitor. As I have said before in many posts wide gamut monitors bring problems relating to this unless you use fully color aware browsers and other programs (and that does not include Safari)
They would also have looked similar on my monitor and in Firefox 3 if one had (incorrectly) been aRGB. This would not though apply in Internet Explorer.
paulhodson wrote:
Firefox 3 they look identical
IE they look identical
Safari bottom image is brighter and over saturated
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Ughhh. So this is some kind of issue with Safari? -But only with SOME monitors?
Or is it a monitor issue?
I need to solve this now, I don't have time to get a doctorate in color management. the differences I'm seeing on my Mac are small, but siginificant. The differences I'm seeing on some pc's is HUGE. I'm sending out promotional materials, and this could actually cost me money.
It's clearly NOT a calibration issue.
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Again, if I figure out how to always have sRGB embedded (why CS2 doesn't do that when it does "save for web" is puzzling) then I should be OK?
Cableaddict wrote:
How the heck can this be? I am ALSO looking at them, in this thread, on a Mac via Safari, and they look glaringly different!
That leads me to believe that you do not have your monitor profile set correctly in ColorSync. Safari is showing the "embedded" JPEG correctly, but your monitor is so far off from sRGB (which is more-or-less what monitors end up to be) that the other looks way different. When I look at them, they are exactly the same. (When Paul looks at them on his wide-gamut monitor that is not close to sRGB, they look different. But as he said, that is a different, special case.) I think I suggested before, go to Display, Color, Calibrate control panel, set gamma to 2.2, and go through the calibration. Make sure you have the monitor profile set to the profile you create, and not Adobe RGB or something else which is not a monitor profile.
If my TIFF file has sRGB embedded, shouldn't the jpegs made in CS2 also be embedded, unless I specifically tell CS2 to strip it out?
Not using "Save For Web," which strips everything out of the JPEG.
Again, if I figure out how to always have sRGB embedded (why CS2 doesn't do that when it does "save for web" is puzzling) then I should be OK?
No. That would be fine if everyone saw your pix in Safari or Firefox, but for the rest of the world, you need to get the color right without embedding. Which isn't as hard as it seems to you now, you just need to take a breath and go back over things. read the Mac help about ColorSync, read the Photoshop help about color, which is not too complicated either.
Cableaddict wrote:
Ughhh. So this is some kind of issue with Safari? -But only with SOME monitors?
Or is it a monitor issue?
I need to solve this now, I don't have time to get a doctorate in color management. the differences I'm seeing on my Mac are small, but siginificant. The differences I'm seeing on some pc's is HUGE. I'm sending out promotional materials, and this could actually cost me money.
It's clearly NOT a calibration issue.
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Again, if I figure out how to always have sRGB embedded (why CS2 doesn't do that when it does "save for web" is puzzling) then I should be OK?...Show more →
Invest in a colorimeter and calibrate your monitor.
I shot raw, so is this set in the converter?
