What happened to the black level?

MileHighAko

I got some nice shots of little league football today - got home and did some light PP in Lightroom 3. Everything looked pretty good, until I uploaded to Smugmug. Now my black levels or contrast or something isn't giving me the same experience I had in LR3. Maybe something to do with the conversion to JPG? Any suggestions? I'm new at the PP world so perhaps I just did something wrong.

Here is the image on Smugmug. The copy in LR3 is much better in the exposure/contrast and you can see the details that are lost here in the black levels. What did I do wrong? I've never had this problem before.

Helvegr

Have you tried exporting the image as a jpeg, using the same settings as the smugmug upload and viewing it? That would at least help to rule out anything strange happening with the image after it leaves your machine.

pathfinder

What browser are you looking at Smugmug with? Is it color space aware?

Your image is tagged as sRGB, as it should be for web viewing. LR3 is color space aware, of course.

MileHighAko

Well - it's a new day. I think I'm getting to the root of my problem. First, I stood out in the sun too long yesterday because my eyes are much clearer today. Also the laptop I was working on last night had it's settings messed up.

Thanks for the advise Helvegr - it isn't a Smugmug issue. It is a JPG issue. I think my photo exposure is just bad enough that when converting to JPG I lose a bunch of detail that is displayed in the RAW.

pathfinder, you're right too. I was using Chrome last night (default on that laptop). Both Firefox and IE9 display the photo much better. It's still a rotten exposure, but better when approached with the right equipment/software.

Thanks for the responses.

arodney

I think my photo exposure is just bad enough that when converting to JPG I lose a bunch of detail that is displayed in the RAW.

That should not be the case. That is, if you a pleasing rendering prior to saving out a JPEG, that’s exactly what you should see when you view the JPEG.

One issue IS Chrome, its not color managed. Firefox is (and I understand IE9 may be? But I’d never think of using it <g>). Safari is also color managed. I suspect this is a browser issue.