Ruined nyc trip photos - bad ICC profile...help!

net1994

Just got back my pics from NYC. I spend about 20 hours (literally) getting them ready, from NEF file to tiff and then uploaded to Adorama pix site. Well got them today and every single one of them were dark and reduced contrast.


I edited them on a IBM T61 laptop with Adobe Photoshop CS2. My camera took the pics with sRGB color profile, and Photoshop's color space was sRGB as well. So I save them all, upload to their site and they even look great on the adorama site. But they all come back looking dark/washed out. My laptop is not color calibrated as such. Uses the default.


Can I save these pics I already worked on? I downloaded the Adorama ICC profiles (4 of them..?). Is it as simple as calibrating my T61 with the adorama profile and then opening each pic and resaving it? Or opening them up and adjust the brightness/contrast in each pic and then saving? Man I'm screwed. Its most likely the T61 as I took same exact pics to another shop and they were printed just the same.


HELP. All that work down the drain...?

Andy

I bet I can help.

Give an example of one or two photos. Link them right here.

net1994

Andy wrote:

I bet I can help.

Give an example of one or two photos. Link them right here.

Here is a sunflower. Now on my site, and on other people's laptops the center of the sunflower is well defined and visible. The bees are distinct. In the picture I got back, the whole 'seed area' was very dark, and the bees were not obvious. Also the blue sky was darker....

http://net1994.smugmug.com/gallery/3438678#192880305-L-LB

The next one in times sq. This one is a bit harder to give visual que's. But on the right and left of the center of the pick is a blue sign for pepsi and a deep neon blue for Mr Peanuts. Both of these areas are bright and very blue. The pic I got back was less bright and less contrast.

http://net1994.smugmug.com/gallery/3438678#192880343-L-LB

Let me know if you see anything Andy. Thanks!

Andy

I'd like to see ALL the photos in one gallery. I'm going to get you a whole new order, on the house, from our Lab

Can you do that for me? What sizes did you have in mind?

net1994

Andy wrote:

I'd like to see ALL the photos in one gallery. I'm going to get you a whole new order, on the house, from our Lab

Can you do that for me? What sizes did you have in mind?

Wow, great!

There were about 30 pics in my adorama order. All 5x7's and one or two 8x10's Its completely up to you which ones you'd like to get printed ... (Though I would be partial to the ones I linked for you.) I don't need all of them reprinted.

Also, when uploading to adorma site most of them were 16bit tiffs with most clocking in at 17-35mb per file. I can reduce them to 8x10 jpegs and then they can be sized down...?

Let me know about the above question, and I will pm you the gallery link.

Andy

Hi, send me an email to our help desk

http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

put ATTN: Andy in the subject.

No TIFFs only JPGs. Upload them to your SmugMug Gallery and I'll have a look.

I'll get you gorgeous prints. How about 30 5x7s?

net1994

Andy wrote:

Hi, send me an email to our help desk

http://www.smugmug.com/help/emailreal

put ATTN: Andy in the subject.

No TIFFs only JPGs. Upload them to your SmugMug Gallery and I'll have a look.

I'll get you gorgeous prints. How about 30 5x7s?

Hi Andy. I just sent all the info to the help desk, attn: you. It has the gallery link. Please let me know if there is anything I will need to do when sending the prints.

Again, you rock! Thanks

claudermilk

net1994 wrote:

I edited them on a IBM T61 laptop with Adobe Photoshop CS2. My camera took the pics with sRGB color profile, and Photoshop's color space was sRGB as well. So I save them all, upload to their site and they even look great on the adorama site. But they all come back looking dark/washed out. My laptop is not color calibrated as such. Uses the default.

That is your problem. The foundation of good image editing is to get your monitor calibrated. I'll bet you adjusted the images to look good in the monitor which involved reducing exposure. Then you checked the colors on the website using the same monitor. Monitors generally come from the factory way too bright & the white point is pushed to 9500K or something silly like that.

photocat

I would not say so, I have no monitor calibrated, and my pics come out good.
I wonder if Adorama is to blame...
Wonder if it would be any good to also ask for a reprint from Adorama and then compare them with smugmug prints....
Maybe it was a one off bad batch...
I hope the smugmug ones come out good. Keep us posted on this!

OffTopic

Easy enough to tell - if the OP posts a few here, those of use with calibrated monitors can see if that is the problem.

BTW - that's a really nice thing to do Andy. It's above and beyond.

net1994

OffTopic wrote:

Easy enough to tell - if the OP posts a few here, those of use with calibrated monitors can see if that is the problem.

BTW - that's a really nice thing to do Andy. It's above and beyond.

I agree, I was taken aback at Andy's offer to do a test print.

I dunno if this was all adorama's fault... Though they did mysteriously add color to a black and white of grand central station . A big yellow/lime tinge running across the top of the 8x10. Not me. BTW, I just bought a spyder2express hardware calibrator-to coverall the bases...will give it a whirls this weekend.

Rockporters

net1994 wrote:

Here is a sunflower. Now on my site, and on other people's laptops the center of the sunflower is well defined and visible. The bees are distinct. In the picture I got back, the whole 'seed area' was very dark, and the bees were not obvious. Also the blue sky was darker....

http://net1994.smugmug.com/gallery/3438678#192880305-L-LB

On my display, the center of the flower is dark. The bees, while visible, require some searching to find. It isn't that I can't see either element, but they are dark and lacking detail. The color of the flower itself is a little drab as well, almost like the picture was taken on an overcast day.

I checked your pictures in Safari, Firefox, and Camino. There is a slight color variation between Safari and the other two. Check your embedded color profile. Calibrating your monitor is a good step, be sure to let us know if the pics look differently for you after running Spyder!

net1994

Rockporters wrote:

On my display, the center of the flower is dark. The bees, while visible, require some searching to find. It isn't that I can't see either element, but they are dark and lacking detail. The color of the flower itself is a little drab as well, almost like the picture was taken on an overcast day.

I checked your pictures in Safari, Firefox, and Camino. There is a slight color variation between Safari and the other two. Check your embedded color profile. Calibrating your monitor is a good step, be sure to let us know if the pics look differently for you after running Spyder!

Andy, Rokporters, etc:

Thanks Andy for the prints. Again, above and beyond!

My worst fears have been realized. The prints while much better than Adorama's print job...are still too dark. Even outside an acceptable margin of error that I know that will happen in the future.

A lot of my best pics from the last 3 months were worked on, on my new Laptop. I know that SEVERAL HUNDRED pictures will need to be reprocessed to adjust for wrong contrast/brightness of my uncalibrated LCD laptop. I hope this is limited to just images processed on my laptop, if I must do the same for images produced on my PC, then I may just give up.

I bought the Spyder2Express hardware calibrator, and there is a big difference after my screen was calibrated. I am going to make a few corrections to problem pics, and have them printed to see how they turn out using. Will also print out a few 'pre-laptop' pictures...

ahhh, the fun never ends...

kygarden

I've got a very bright and new Dell ultra sharp 20" flat panel, fairly well calibrated...and the sunflower photo is as described....looks good to me here. So that's at least one more monitor that thinks the picture looks fine as is.

P.S. I generally try to stay away from editing on my laptop, even though it has the better screen offered by Dell. It's just not as good as a really good desktop monitor.

Sweeper

Hey Folks,

A newbie here! I sure am glad to have found this post in particular. I have just finished a wedding and am having one heck of a problem getting the photos to print what I see on the monitor. I am running on an ACER 22 inch monitor and new PC in March of this year. Windows XP, and an Epson R-800 printer. I have calibrated and recalibrated the monitor and tried every which way but loose to get the prints to match what I see on the screen. I have uploaded and installed the new Epson special drivers as a last resort but no difference. Ink tanks which were not empty but very low, were changed today. No difference.

The photos themselves are showing up fine on other computers. Just as I have modified them to look. But the prints are dark or have colour casts which do not belong.

My site here at SmugMug is not very old, in fact I just uploaded several pics last week. Day job is nothing short of 70 hrs/week and I am limited for time.

Anyway, if anybody has any ideas on how to get a final output from my program "Paint Shop Pro" (latest version 12) then help is much appreciated!!

Tks...
Steve (aka "sweeper")

www.sweeper.smugmug.com

SloYerRoll

Sweeper wrote:

if anybody has any ideas on how to get a final output from my program "Paint Shop Pro" (latest version 12) then help is much appreciated!!

Hey Steve, Welcome to dgrin!

I think you'll have much greater success (and visiblilty) posting a new thread in this forum or in Digital Darkroom gear.
Make sure you put a detailed title line in your new post so ppl looking in your link will know what you need or are looking for the same answers as you.

If your monitor is calibrated, it's calibrated. It sounds like there's a discrepancy in color management workflow that can be resolved pretty easily though.

Make sure to put more detail than less when posting so other posters don't have to ask questions and can just hopefully give you an answer and make all this go away in minimal time!

All the best,
-Jon

net1994

Last question I have in this thread (don't hold me to that ;-)......

Since the OP, I have:

-calibrated my laptop and pc CRT monitor using Spyder2Express. My god, what a difference. Both had their Kelvin jacked up to 7500k-very cool blue cast.
-In Photoshop CS2 I am using this profile as working space, and now proofing using the ezprint profile as shown in the smugmug monitor/ezprint calibration guide.

When comparing photos in IE/FF and Photshop CS2, there is a overall match. Definitely not a exact match across the board-there were a few slight variations, but not too many trade offs. Now my new questions:

-Now that everything is calibrated, how do I go about adjusting/correcting my NYC trip photos (and hundreds of others...)? When I open up each pic, it has sRGB IEC-95..... profile in each pic. Do I discard this profile, convert it, or use the embedded profile?

-Should I revert to the original monitor profile, open up photoshop and use Spyder2Express profile as a working space and then just Proof the pictures using ezprints profile? Not sure how to connect the dots to fix these problems.

(BTW-I do not print photos here at home. Do all of that at Smugmug or Adorama. So any proofing/saving would be for their printers.)

Thoughts....? Its gonna be a LOT of work to fix these nice photos before they go back up on my site. (Wow, thats a lot of typing..!)

arodney

net1994 wrote:

-In Photoshop CS2 I am using this profile as working space, and now proofing using the ezprint profile as shown in the smugmug monitor/ezprint calibration guide.

It shoud NOT be set as the working space! Use a well behaved editing space (sRGB, Adobe RGB (1998), etc). There's no reason to load the display profile here, its only being used for previews.

When comparing photos in IE/FF and Photshop CS2, there is a overall match. Definitely not a exact match across the board-there were a few slight variations, but not too many trade offs.

IE/FF are not color managed (Safari is). That's the reason they don't match and never will.

Now that everything is calibrated, how do I go about adjusting/correcting my NYC trip photos (and hundreds of others...)? When I open up each pic, it has sRGB IEC-95..... profile in each pic. Do I discard this profile, convert it, or use the embedded profile?

Set sRGB as your RGB working space. Set your policies for Preserve. Leave the images along with respect to color space conversions at this point! They are in sRGB (because that's what you set for capture). They will preview correctly because Photoshop is looking at the numbers in the images and knows they are in sRGB, then looks at the display profile and produces a correct preview. That's NOT what IE/FF are doing. They totally ignore the embedded profile and the display profile.

Edit the images to produce a desired color appearance. Load the output profile for the printing conditions as a soft proof to see on screen what the prints should look like. Edit a copy/adjustment layer if necessary base do this correct preview and send that edited copy to the lab.

Should I revert to the original monitor profile, open up photoshop and use Spyder2Express profile as a working space and then just Proof the pictures using ezprints profile? Not sure how to connect the dots to fix these problems.

Absolutely not!

Time to read up on how Photoshop handles previews and color spaces in documents:

http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/phscs2ip_colspace.pdf

net1994

Well as anyone/everyone can see here...I'm am not a Colorspace pro!

Now what I would like to do is switch back and forth between monitor color profiles on my pc. This I can see the original sRGB photo on uncalibrated monitor in CS2 without using the EZprint profile. Then compare that to the newly calibrated monitor and now using EZprint profile.

But I can't find a way to have the Spyder2Express profile switch on/off at will.......grh.......

arodney

net1994 wrote:

Well as anyone/everyone can see here...I'm am not a Colorspace pro!

Now what I would like to do is switch back and forth between monitor color profiles on my pc. This I can see the original sRGB photo on uncalibrated monitor in CS2 without using the EZprint profile. Then compare that to the newly calibrated monitor and now using EZprint profile.

But I can't find a way to have the Spyder2Express profile switch on/off at will.......grh.......

Photoshop always accesses some ICC profile for the display. You can't not have that. You've got the calibrated profile now. What you were using before? I have no idea. But something (some profile in your system) was being used. Why would you want to view the images with that?

net1994

arodney wrote:

Photoshop always accesses some ICC profile for the display. You can't not have that. You've got the calibrated profile now. What you were using before? I have no idea. But something (some profile in your system) was being used. Why would you want to view the images with that?

So I can view how pics looked to my eyes weeks ago when originally processing them. Using that as a reference as to how I believed they were going to be printed. Then I can switch to my calibrated monitor with the Spyder2Express profile and see the amount of work I will need to do to get the pics to what I want them to look like, correctly,

If its possible to toggle back and forth it would be a good reference when working on the pics, again.

arodney

net1994 wrote:

So I can view how pics looked to my eyes weeks ago when originally processing them. Using that as a reference as to how I believed they were going to be printed.

Even thought that view was science fiction? Anyway, what you want to do is possible, but I have absolutely no idea what ICC profile for your display was used prior to the calibration.

net1994

arodney wrote:

Even thought that view was science fiction? Anyway, what you want to do is possible, but I have absolutely no idea what ICC profile for your display was used prior to the calibration.

I have been editing most of my pics in the last 5 months on my IBM T60 laptop, with its lowly default 'IBMTHKPD' profile.

Thanks arodney for the help on the Photoshop colorprofile info. I just hope I can remember the adjustments I originally applied to my pics from months ago. Having to rework many with mostly guessing, that will be interesting (but in a completely non-fun way. Theres not getting around it, this sucks!)