Color discrepancy - I need help

Hfritsche

Recently I decided to put up a website using Smugmug. After creating it and uploading a few of my photos, I noticed significant desaturation of color, not drastic, but significant. The vibrant colors of a golden sunset on red rocks is noticeably desaturated, making it appear somewhat "drab".

At first I suspected the Smugmug site. After discussion with the help desk and some further investigation and thought, I no longer believe that. I have found that the only 3 programs that display my photos correctly are Lightroom, Photoshop and Windows Photo Viewer. If I import into anything else, Word, Excel, MS Paint, etc., the photos are "drab".

If I email any of these photos, they are received (on numerous devices) in their "drab" condition. I have sent them to my wife's PC laptop, and to her iPad... drab. I have pulled up the Smugmug website on other computers... drab. However, if I take any of these emailed photos, or download from the new website, when imported back into LR or PS or Win Photo Viewer, they are back to normal.

I calibrate my monitors regularly using Spyder 3. One perhaps complicating factor... I very recently replaced my graphics card. I'm not using a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970. Drivers are up to date.

I'm at a loss and could really use some help.

Thx,
Harold Fritsche

Windows 7
Nvidia GTX 970 GPU
Lightroom CC 2015
Photoshop CC 2014

PS: I'm attaching a screenshot which will hopefully illustrate the problem. Depending on how you view it, I'm not sure how it will look. The difference in the saturation of the mountain's colors is not subtle.

Lille Ulven

Just an idea... I might be way off...
But could it be the color space that you have formatted your photos in? Could it be that you have chosen one that is not (fully) supported by those other programs but is by Adobe and Windows Photo Viewer?

Could you, by the way, add the address of your website to your signature? It would make it easier for us to see what you see in "large" and help you out

Good luck

Lille Ulven

Hfritsche

Reply to Lille
Thank you for your comment Lille. I did provide these photos in the sRGB color space as requested.

Re: the signature line... how do you do that?

denisegoldberg

Hfritsche wrote: »

Re: the signature line... how do you do that?

Click the clipboard icon in the navbar above, then Edit Signature.
Use the insert link icon (the globe with a chain link on it) to make your links clickable.

--- Denise

Lille Ulven

Big brother google delivered two potential causes for your problem - or well it seems to be rather one cause:
look here http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/2941209 or here: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/772628?tstart=0

So at least for opening your photo in programs like Word you might blame Word and its color-management-incapabilities.
If you are getting the same problem from LR -> Smugmug I wonder if you somehow managed to store your file with a color profile that Smugmug cannot deal with, some ICC behind the sRGB maybe.

I don't know how comfortable you are using the command line and exiftool (or if you have a GUI for exiftool that could show you those values) but the photos that I have placed online have the following color-profile values:
Device Model : sRGB
Profile Description : sRGB IEC61966-2.1
Device Model Desc : IEC 61966-2.1 Default RGB colour space - sRGB

These seem to work in my browsers at least.

Good luck

Lille Ulven

Hfritsche

Denise... thank you. I'll find out in this post if it works.

Lille... I read the rather lengthy posts you found. There are indeed sililarities, but significantly different. Re: the Exif data, I have a program called ExifPilot which seems capable of displaying everything Exif. I didn't know so many items existed. That said, I cannot find the three items you listed anywhere. What do you use to get that info.

Hfritsche

Oops. Where is my signature. I edited per Denise's suggestion. "Show your signature" box is checked (bottom right in screen).

Now what am I not doing?

denisegoldberg

Hfritsche wrote: »

Oops. Where is my signature. I edited per Denise's suggestion. "Show your signature" box is checked (bottom right in screen).

Now what am I not doing?

I see a signature for you.
I would recommend removing your email address and just leaving your web URL. An email address in clear text is an invitation to spambots.

--- Denise

Lille Ulven

Hfritsche I am using a command-line tool called exiftool - there are GUIs who can display what exiftool deliveres, but I tend to use it straight from the command-line and then I would use some more linux-commands to get what I need to see... but of course that is not very helpful on a Windows machine...
Those values should be in a section called "ICC_PROFILE"

I suspect that your tool might use exiftool in the background and that you could use exiftool from your command line as well.
So if you go to
"Programs" - "Search" (I think if I recall it right) and type in "cmd" and then press "enter" you should get the command line to open. If you can use exiftool from there you could go to your directory with one of your photos and type there:
exiftool -G filename.jpg > output_exiftool.txt
(You have to replace filename.jpg with your actual filename.) This should generate a text-file in that very directory that you can open with for example Notepad and there you could search for ICC_Profile or "rgb" and you should find the values that count for your file.

Good luck

Lille Ulven

AperturePlus

Harald I am not sure if this is going to help you, but I experienced something similar and it had to do with the way that Firefox Mac (in my case) handled its' colour management.

More reading for you.. but you might want to have a look at this and see if it helps at all. http://ntown.at/2013/12/28/firefox-color-management/

The trouble is that if anyone else viewing has not set their's correctly, it is still going to look 'drab'.