Help with saving photos to web

dkapp

Just recently I've run into problems where the photo in Adobe Photoshop (srgb profile) does not look anything like the web. When I even tried save for web, I get the dull washed out colors like I see online. I've never had this problem before, and I would appreciate any help.

Below are two screen shots. In each image, the top picture is how it looks in photoshop, and the bottom is what I see on the web. The colors just wash out no matter how I save the picture.





Any ideas what I could be doing wrong?

Thanks,
Dave

lynnma

dkapp wrote:

Just recently I've run into problems where the photo in Adobe Photoshop (srgb profile) does not look anything like the web. When I even tried save for web, I get the dull washed out colors like I see online. I've never had this problem before, and I would appreciate any help.

Below are two screen shots. In each image, the top picture is how it looks in photoshop, and the bottom is what I see on the web. The colors just wash out no matter how I save the picture.





Any ideas what I could be doing wrong?

Thanks,
Dave

Hi Dave.. others will probably answer this more completely than me but I'll have a go. When you save for the web you are optimizing for the web so some of the quality will be gone from your shot.. if you must optimzie I would crank up your colors, saturation etc to compensate a bit. If you are saving for smugmug save as a jpeg, don't save for the web, and also just before you save go to "image" "mode" then "convert to profile" and choose sRGB...just checked your message and I can see you do that.. hmmm
I recently found (doh) that I could only save as jpeg after converting to 8bits from 16bits... only took my 3 years... kept wondering why somtimes I could and sometimes I couldn't..hope this helps.

Is there a reason why you need to save for the web?? I have a great program that allows me to watch as I optimize so I can be right on the edge of the quality I need and still keep the file size down.. I'll look it up for you.
Lynn

dkapp

lynnma wrote:

Hi Dave.. others will probably answer this more completely than me but I'll have a go. When you save for the web you are optimizing for the web so some of the quality will be gone from your shot.. if you must optimzie I would crank up your colors, saturation etc to compensate a bit. If you are saving for smugmug save as a jpeg, don't save for the web, and also just before you save go to "image" "mode" then "convert to profile" and choose sRGB...just checked your message and I can see you do that.. hmmm
I recently found (doh) that I could only save as jpeg after converting to 8bits from 16bits... only took my 3 years... kept wondering why somtimes I could and sometimes I couldn't..hope this helps.

Is there a reason why you need to save for the web?? I have a great program that allows me to watch as I optimize so I can be right on the edge of the quality I need and still keep the file size down.. I'll look it up for you.
Lynn

Thanks for taking the time to post Lynn. I really appreciate it. After hours of researching the issue, I finally figured out what was going wrong. In the save for web window that pops up, there is a little triangle drop down menu thingy. For some reason it was switched from "Use Document Color Profile" to "Uncompensated Color." After switching the setting back, my colors were a LOT more accurate.

I was not comfortable pumping up the saturation and contrast to make the web version look like the original in photoshop. I was concerned that if someone were to buy that print, it would not come out correctly...but I'm not sure. That is something for Chris or Don to answer. This whole color profile thing can get out of control quick!

Here are the two final images from last night.





Thanks again for your help.

Dave

lynnma

dkapp wrote:

Thanks for taking the time to post Lynn. I really appreciate it. After hours of researching the issue, I finally figured out what was going wrong. In the save for web window that pops up, there is a little triangle drop down menu thingy. For some reason it was switched from "Use Document Color Profile" to "Uncompensated Color." After switching the setting back, my colors were a LOT more accurate.

I was not comfortable pumping up the saturation and contrast to make the web version look like the original in photoshop. I was concerned that if someone were to buy that print, it would not come out correctly...but I'm not sure. That is something for Chris or Don to answer. This whole color profile thing can get out of control quick!

Here are the two final images from last night.





Thanks again for your help.

Dave

thats very interesting Dave... I did'nt know about that little thingy.. love these shots.. your stitched bridge is fabulous

pathfinder

dkapp wrote:

Thanks for taking the time to post Lynn. I really appreciate it. After hours of researching the issue, I finally figured out what was going wrong. In the save for web window that pops up, there is a little triangle drop down menu thingy. For some reason it was switched from "Use Document Color Profile" to "Uncompensated Color." After switching the setting back, my colors were a LOT more accurate.

I was not comfortable pumping up the saturation and contrast to make the web version look like the original in photoshop. I was concerned that if someone were to buy that print, it would not come out correctly...but I'm not sure. That is something for Chris or Don to answer. This whole color profile thing can get out of control quick!

Here are the two final images from last night.





Thanks again for your help.

Dave

I think you werre experiencing what a lot of us have noticed with smugmug, if you do not explicitly convert the color space to sRGB before uploading ( you apparently thought you were but found that you actually were not) .

I used to uplink my images in Adobe RGB thinking it was a larger color gamut - but I found that smugmug just strips that ICC profile off the image and does not replace it but leaves it blank - click on Photo Details in smugmug for the color space - and they end up seeming unsaturated as a result. I posted the same image uploaded as sRGB and Adobe RGB to smugmug of my preview image for the landscape challenge to demonstrate this effect. Baldy had this to say about color spaces also http://dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=24304&postcount=4

But if I convert my image to sRGB in Photoshop (not for web usage ) and then upload, when I check Photo Details in smugmug the image carries the label of sRGB color space and resembles the image as seen loaded in Photoshop on my monitor.

dkapp

pathfinder wrote:

I think you werre experiencing what a lot of us have noticed with smugmug, if you do not explicitly convert the color space to sRGB before uploading ( you apparently thought you were but found that you actually were not) .

I used to uplink my images in Adobe RGB thinking it was a larger color gamut - but I found that smugmug just strips that ICC profile off the image and does not replace it but leaves it blank - click on Photo Details in smugmug for the color space - and they end up seeming unsaturated as a result. I posted the same image uploaded as sRGB and Adobe RGB to smugmug of my preview image for the landscape challenge to demonstrate this effect. Baldy had this to say about color spaces also http://dgrin.com/showpost.php?p=24304&postcount=4

But if I convert my image to sRGB in Photoshop (not for web usage ) and then upload, when I check Photo Details in smugmug the image carries the label of sRGB color space and resembles the image as seen loaded in Photoshop on my monitor.

This was a strange one. It has been working fine since I got PS CS, but just decided to ignore my profiles for no reason. I've always liked to use the save for web option because it give me a lot of flexibility w/ file size and compression. Plus what I see in save for web is exactly what I see in smugmug.

Thanks for the link, I've bookmarked it along with the others from my research today. Hopefully I won't have to deal with this again, but I have a feeling I've not see the last of this one.