Photo processing dilemma

macmassey

I recently bought a Canon 40D, which I absolutely love. It came with photo processing software (Digitial Photo Professional), which I installed and have been using. The photos look incredible when viewed through through DPP. However, if I open the same photo with Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is my computer's default photo viewer, the photos look completely different. They aren't sharp and the colors seem drab. Even when I upload my photos to Smugmug, after making adjustments in DPP, they don't look near as good as they did in the DPP. Is this a common issue? Should I be adjustiing the photos until they look good through the Windows Live Photo Gallery? What would cause the discrepancy in their appearance?

ziggy53

Make sure that you are converting to sRGB and not Adobe RGB. sRGB is the color-space that most display applications and browsers understand.

Also, if you reduce the resolution for web presentation, you generally have to sharpen the image after the downsample. SmugMug can do this for you automatically for any of the smaller web presentation sizes.

macmassey

Thanks for your quick reply. Does it matter if I am shooting jpg vs RAW? Also in the conversion process when I do shoot RAW, I didn't notice if it gives me an option to select sRGB, but, my camera is actually set to sRGB so would I still need to select that?

2nd part of the question is, it seems what you're saying is the photo should look consistently good regardless of the viewer used? If so, then clearly I"m doing something wrong in the processing so I'll try to figure out what's happening re: the sRGB. I really appreciate your feedback and help with this. Obviously I am very new to all of this!

ziggy53 wrote:

Make sure that you are converting to sRGB and not Adobe RGB. sRGB is the color-space that most display applications and browsers understand.

Also, if you reduce the resolution for web presentation, you generally have to sharpen the image after the downsample. SmugMug can do this for you automatically for any of the smaller web presentation sizes.

ziggy53

macmassey wrote:

Thanks for your quick reply. Does it matter if I am shooting jpg vs RAW? Also in the conversion process when I do shoot RAW, I didn't notice if it gives me an option to select sRGB, but, my camera is actually set to sRGB so would I still need to select that?

2nd part of the question is, it seems what you're saying is the photo should look consistently good regardless of the viewer used? If so, then clearly I"m doing something wrong in the processing so I'll try to figure out what's happening re: the sRGB. I really appreciate your feedback and help with this. Obviously I am very new to all of this!

If you shoot JPGs and if your camera is set to record in Adobe RGB, the image files will generally have an underscore as the first character in the file name, i.e. "_MG_xxxx.JPG", as opposed to the sRGB JPG file name, "IMG_xxxx.JPG".

If you shoot RAW files, CR2 suffix files, then it is up to the settings of your RAW image conversion software as to sRGB vs Adobe RGB color-space. In either case I believe that the export file names will be the same leading to some confusion.

In Canon's DPP software, you will find the settings in:

Tools
Preferences
Color management (Tab)

P.S. You may also need to play with the "Color Matching Settings" in that same tab to get everything to match.