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Photos blotchy with color artifact when displayed in SmugMug
dismalhiker
Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
This is my first post in this forum. SmugMug is great, by far the best image site. However, I'm having a problem with photo conversion after upload. The photos look fine prior to upload, but when displayed, the dark areas are blotchy with lots of color artifact. The file is sRGB IEC61966-2.1 and looks perfectly fine in Photoshop or in Irfanview as a jpg. Also, I checked in PS and there are no 'out of gamut' areas in the photos when this happens.
I attached a file illustrating this. The left side is the original, the right side is how it looks in SmugMug on the monitor. However, even the display of this example in this forum is blotchy, like on SmugMug. If you can download the attachment, it will probably look like the original.
Also, even when a photo looks blotchy on SmugMug, the file looks fine when downloaded from SmugMug. So, it seems to be something about the display of photos.
Has anyone else encountered this? I must be doing something wrong. I tried to search but didn't find a topic on this. Here is an example. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
[EDIT] I just noticed that I file I uploaded last night was very blotchy in dark areas on SmugMug, but this morning the same photo looks good. Is there some kind of initial display of a rapid conversion when photos are first uploaded, that later is refined (within a few hours)?
I attached a file illustrating this. The left side is the original, the right side is how it looks in SmugMug on the monitor. However, even the display of this example in this forum is blotchy, like on SmugMug. If you can download the attachment, it will probably look like the original.
Also, even when a photo looks blotchy on SmugMug, the file looks fine when downloaded from SmugMug. So, it seems to be something about the display of photos.
Has anyone else encountered this? I must be doing something wrong. I tried to search but didn't find a topic on this. Here is an example. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
[EDIT] I just noticed that I file I uploaded last night was very blotchy in dark areas on SmugMug, but this morning the same photo looks good. Is there some kind of initial display of a rapid conversion when photos are first uploaded, that later is refined (within a few hours)?
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Thanks for trying to help. At this point I don't have any examples to link to because they have all converted to being fine. The link to the site is below anyway.
When photos with dark areas were first uploaded, the photo was visible almost immediately but with a lot of posterization. However, over time (in some cases several hours) the images appear to undergo further processing and then look fine. I guess this is a feature of SmugMug that I was not aware of.
Can anyone confirm that this initial posterization followed by later additional processing is normal behavior for newly uploaded photos on SmugMug?
Sorry for the alarm.
___
http://dismalhiker.smugmug.com
Thanks!
Any assistance is appreciated.
Thanks
OK... I'm also still having this problem, intermittently and its confusing. When I first posted this here, it was happening in Chrome and to a lesser extent in other browsers on the same computer. The original image was not posterized/blotchy, but appeared so (on the same computer, same monitor) after uploading to Smugmug. If I then downloaded the image from smugmug, it looked OK.
Then I noticed that the same image that was posterized in Smugmug on one computer, was not when viewed on a different computer. So I went through a period of trying to figure out why it appeared to be computer specific and, to some degree browser specific. At one point, it seemed that adjusting the color management settings on Chrome and Firefox made an improvement and I thought the problem had resolved (for me).
However, just last night I noticed it again. Photo looked fine, but when uploaded to Smugmug looked posterized/blotchy... but then... when I went downstairs and viewed it on a different computer, it looked OK.
At this point I've adjusted color management in all of my browsers, loaded the latest Nvidia drivers for my graphics card, etc... and still intermittently seem to have this problem when pics are uploaded to Smugmug. Could it be a colorspace gamut issue? All of my pics are standard sRGB IEC 61966-2.1 .
Anyway, I'm still confused by this and don't have an answer. I thought it was only me, and perhaps a local problem, which is why I didn't post again.
The image is looking fine to me. I suspect that you have something going on with your browser or your ISP. Have you removed any and all extensions /addons in your browser? Have you tried multiple browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome)?
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Thanks for the reply. I'm at my wit's end trying to resolve this. First let me thank you for confirming that the image looks clean through SmugMug on your end. This tells me that it is definitely NOT an issue with SmugMug (and thus is not a bug on your end).
I removed all browser extensions and tested viewing the image in both Firefox and Chrome and the result is the same blotchy, dithered looking image. I viewed the image through SmugMug on my ipad over wifi (same ISP) using both Chrome and Safari and the image is perfect.
I've searched for hours now and can't come up with a reason to explain why a web browser (both Firefox and Chrome in this case) would display images in substandard quality - while images otherwise look fine outside of the browser, i.e., Lightroom, Irfanview.
Anybody have any ideas as to what might affect image quality within web browsers under Windows 7? Is there some OS variable that would degrade IQ in web browsers alone? Is there perhaps some color management profile setting that might influence this?
Any additional ideas or suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks.