Help with color profiles?

[Porter]

Hello all! I'm having an issue in LR 2 Beta.

First of all, I'm using a calibrated monitor profile (Spyder2express). This is loaded into the OS using the Spyder startup utility and verified in the Windows Color Control Powertoy.


My issue is that the image that I see in LR is tonally different from the same image exported as an sRGB JPEG. The exported JPEGs are flat, with less saturation and more of a blue push. Appearance of the JPEGs is consistent in the Windows viewer, in FF 2.', in IE7, and in FF 3.'. The only place the image looks "correct" is in Lightroom itself prior to export.

I am not using Photoshop... this is Lightroom only.

I'm wondering if Lightroom is double-profiling the LR view, and overshooting the color targets by double-applying the monitor profile?? It's the only thing I can think of. Where can you adjust the display/editing profile in LR 2.'? I can't even find it in the preferences.


Can anyone help?


Thanks in advance!

-Porter

 

[KeithR]

Hello all! I'm having an issue in LR 2 Beta.

First of all, I'm using a calibrated monitor profile (Spyder2express). This is loaded into the OS using the Spyder startup utility and verified in the Windows Color Control Powertoy.


My issue is that the image that I see in LR is tonally different from the same image exported as an sRGB JPEG. The exported JPEGs are flat, with less saturation and more of a blue push. Appearance of the JPEGs is consistent in the Windows viewer, in FF 2.', in IE7, and in FF 3.'. The only place the image looks "correct" is in Lightroom itself prior to export.

I am not using Photoshop... this is Lightroom only.

I'm wondering if Lightroom is double-profiling the LR view, and overshooting the color targets by double-applying the monitor profile?? It's the only thing I can think of. Where can you adjust the display/editing profile in LR 2.'? I can't even find it in the preferences.


Can anyone help?


Thanks in advance!

-Porter

I don't belive you can change the editing profile. Lightroom(current version) only uses ProPhoto as it's native color space. Outputing to a different color space will result in color changes as you are greatly compressing the space(going to sRGB).

 

[Porter]

I don't understand. Why wouldn't LR convert the working profile to the equivalent perceptual values in sRGB when it outputs? Even if the color gamut is reduced, it seems like there should be visually equivalent screen-output values for sRGB.

If the output visuals change when you save for the web, it seems like that would eliminate LR entirely for professonal camera-to-web production work... and I can't imagine that Adobe has that as their aim!

Maybe I'm completely missing something.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi Porter, welcome to the forum!

Ignoring which profiles Lightroom's using behind the scenes (it's actually MelissaRGB which I believe is a ProPhotoRGB with a modified gamma... but don't quote me on that!), let's get back to basics.

There will be a slight shift between what you see in Lightroom and a colour managed program viewing the sRGB file, but it should be very minor, and is simply due to the conversion to a smaller colour space.

There will also be a slight shift when you view a file in a non-colour-managed program, such as Windows web browsers, picture viewer etc. due to the fact that they are not colour managed - but that's not a Lightroom issue, that's a global colour management issue.

If you're seeing a big shift though, something else is going on.

You'll find numerous threads here which may be useful, but most often a shift results from a corrupted monitor profile, which Lightroom is particularly sensitive too, so recalibrating your monitor would be a good first step.

Next port of call - do you have any other colour managed programs to be able to check the files? Alternatively upload low res files here and we'll take a look.

 

[Brad Snyder]

Another quick check is to reimport the jpeg into LR to compare to insure nothing's going wrong in the export. Of the apps you mentioned, I believe that only FF 3.' is color managed, but I don't have any experience in verifying it's setup.

You said you weren't using Photoshop in this process, do you have it available?

If the output visuals change when you save for the web, it seems like that would eliminate LR entirely for professonal camera-to-web production work

That's going to happen to a certain extent no matter what you do and what tools you use, because unless you're dealing directly with other professionals, your target audience is likely color-naive and uncalibrated. If you want to put the exact colors that you want in their hands, you're going to have to resort to mailing them a print. I'm exaggerating for effect, but for the general web audience, who knows how they have their displays set up? You go to a tremendous amount of trouble to get it right, they usually don't.

 

[Porter]

Thanks for the information, folks! I'll let you know what I discover.