Bay Photo ICC profile and browser view

Backatcha

Hi All,
New to forum...

I have been using Bay Photo via smugmug and recently upgraded my smugmug account to sell prints directly to customers without getting in the middle.

I'm having a lot of trouble managing the color. I have a Windows 7 workstation and good quality HP2475w monitor, and ATI Radeon HD4550 graphics card. I've calibrated with a colormunki using the advanced functions during calibration.

There are two questions I have regarding color.
I shoot Prophoto RGB and edit RAW files in Lightroom in AdobeRGB color space and then export to .jpg sRGB. The jpg's look great in PS CS5 in sRGB with fantastic color and skin tone. When I softproof with the Bay ICC profile, they get drab, muddy and dull. If I try to add more saturation they get constrasty and the skin tones go to hell. The prints I'm getting from Bay(with color correction) look a little dark and not as saturated--so I've turned my monitor luminance down manually after calibration to compensate. So I guess the output from Bay is closer to the soft proof on screen.

When I upload the great looking jpgs to Smugmug, they look totally oversaturated in a Chrome or Windows Explorer browser and I have to back way off on the saturation to make them look acceptable in the browser. To account for the smugmug oversaturation, they look totally under saturated when viewed in Photoshop CS5.

I'm wondering if my graphics card is the problem but after many hours of trying to figure this out, I'm out of ideas.. I think I have a good understanding of color management but can't seem to nail this down.

Thanks!!

Bob_A

Just to clarify. You are shooting in RAW, so even if your camera is set to ProPhoto it is meaningless for Adobe Camera Raw. The only impact having a ProPhoto setting in your camera will be with regards to the preview on the camera and the camera's histogram.

I may be wrong but suspect that when you are exporting your images from Lightroom that they are "untagged". The problem with untagged images is that none of the browsers (except Firefox after some tweaking) can display them correctly on a wide gamut monitor calibrated to full gamut. Your images should look over saturated, especially with reds, and overly contrasty.

The solution to this is to use Firefox AND change one of it's hidden settings to allow color management for all images. If you don't want to mess around with Firefox's hidden settings then just download the "Color Management" add-on and under options set things to color manage all images. Understanding why this happens is important, since it also means that other people using a wide gamut monitor will see you images incorrectly. Because of that it's important to ensure your images are properly tagged as sRGB when you save them for web use.

The trouble with all of the browsers, including Firefox without the hidden setting set, is that they'll do things like using your monitor profile if the image is untagged ... which is not what you want to do with a wide gamut monitor calibrated to full gamut.

By the way, even if your images are tagged properly as sRGB and you use a color managed browser your images will STILL look overly saturated (reds) and too contrasty whenever the site is using Adobe Flash Player to display your images. This is one of my gripes with Smugmug since they use Adobe Flash Player for the default (non-HTML5) home page slideshow and for the built in gallery slideshows. You can replace the homepage slideshow pretty easily with an HTML5 one, but if you use the standard galleries you're stuck with slideshows that will display your images wrong. The gallery and thumbnails will be fine though and so will the page where you can select different sizes for your image ... it's just the slideshow that will have color issues due to them using Adobe Flash Player.

Smugmug isn't the only site with this issue either. From what I can tell most of the image sharing sites use Adobe Flash Player. This is going to need to be resolved soon since many people are now purchasing wide gamut monitors even though they have zero need for them and a standard gamut monitor would be a better choice. Just because something costs more or can display a larger volume of colors doesn't mean it's "better". Wide gamut is actually only better if you need it, and worse if you don't

Also keep in mind that Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, and all flash based videos will display overly saturated (reds) and too contrasty on a wide gamut monitor. If you like watching videos while you edit then download a copy of Media Player Classic - Home Cinema from Sourceforge and set color management on.