Color balance wrong in thumbnails, fine in exported JPGs

[mason72]

Hi there. I'm shooting in RAW from a 5D Mark II, using a color calibrated monitor and WB set from a graycard, but my colors look way off when I am editing them in Lightroom.

When I export the images to JPG, they look fine and the colors are back to normal, but I'm not sure why they are wrong when I am viewing the DNG. Is it a color space issue?

I am capturing the RAW files with the color space set to sRGB in the camera...do I need to change this do AdobeRGB?

Right now, I am just "trusting" the graycard, but it is frustrating looking at all these images that *seem* to have the wrong WB setting...

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Mark Sirota]

Welcome to Lightroom Forums!

The in-camera color space setting is irrelevant if you're shooting raw -- it only affects the embedded preview, which is also shown on the back of the camera and used to calculate the histogram displayed by the camera. But once you get to the computer, none of that matters.

Does the white part of LR's histogram look white? If not, you may have a corrupted monitor profile, in which case recalibrating should fix it.

 

[mason72]

Thanks Mark!

I don't think it's a monitor profile issue, because the JPG looks fine on the same monitor. I've attached an image which shows a screen capture of the same image in both Lightroom and when viewing the JPG; maybe that will help?

 

[Brad Snyder]

Mason, dittos on the Welcome.

a) what are you viewing the respective images with? Left, I assume Lr, what software for the right hand image?

b) Assuming that it's not a display system issue because JPGs look OK, is usually not a sound diagnostic tool.

c) As Mark asked, is there any color cast displayed in the normally neutral gray portions of the Lr histogram?

 

[Denis Pagé]

I fully agree with Mark and Brad. And when you use a perfectly calibrated monitor, it can very well display wrong colors if the program you use to view them is not color managed...

 

[Victoria Bampton]

And whilst it sounds a bit odd, Lightroom uses the profile differently to other programs, so a profile that appears ok in other programs may be corrupted when used in Lightroom.

 

[mason72]

a) what are you viewing the respective images with? Left, I assume Lr, what software for the right hand image?

Yeah, the image on the left is from LR, and the image on the right is a screenshot taken from Picasa Photo Viewer. The images end up online, and the colors look okay when I view them in IE, Firefox, etc. as well.

b) Assuming that it's not a display system issue because JPGs look OK, is usually not a sound diagnostic tool.

Fair enough. I've re-calibrated my monitor using an Eye-One Photo, and still see the problem though.

c) As Mark asked, is there any color cast displayed in the normally neutral gray portions of the Lr histogram?

Nope, the neutral gray portions of the histogram look right, as far as I can tell.

Thanks for the help!

 

[Mark Sirota]

Picasa, IE, and Firefox are not color-managed (you can enable color management in Firefox 3.', but it's not enabled by default). So even though that copy looks better, it's wrong, and the color-managed version on the left is right.

Assuming your monitor is calibrated, make it look the way you want it to look in Lightroom. Then choose sRGB on export, and see how it looks in your non-color-managed tools (or use color-managed tools instead).

 

[mason72]

Interesting...who knew? Hehe, I guess you guys. :-D

Thanks for the info...I'll give it a go.

 

[Denis Pagé]

Interesting...who knew? Hehe, I guess you guys. :-D

Thanks for the info...I'll give it a go.

OH! And as I forgot the good manners, Welcome to the forums!
Feel free to come back as needed.