Horrible JPEG rendation in LR compared to other programs.

[andersl]

When going through some of my older JPEGs photos i noticed that when viewing at them in LR, they look really, really bad. When opening them in another program, say, Firefox under OS X or Thumbs Plus under Windows, they look much better.

To make things really bad, when exporting the image from LR and viewing them in another program (again Firefox), the artifacts were present in the exported image!!! (To me, this could be a show-stopper!)

The picture in question which looked worse was a stage shot where the entire background was lit in green. When looking in other programs the green area transitioned smoothly from one nuance to another.

Under LR, on the other hand, it looked like someone had drawn the background with only, say, three or four shades of green, where there were really sharp edges between the areas. (When looking closer, the areas contained small variations, but there was a big jump between the areas.)

The picture is not manipulated in LR in any way, this is the way it looks when imported.

Below are screen-shots of a small area of the picture displayed in LR (P13) and Firefox (P14), respectively. I could provide you (or Adobe) with the full image if that could help to track down the problem. You can see the distinct line going from the red spotlight.

What makes things worse is that the green areas with distinct differently colors often creates pattern that spread over large areas of the picture. For example, in LP (P2') and Firefox (P21). The patterns stand out a lot more when viewed on an otherwise dark screen.

 

[andersl]

The last two attachements...

 

[Victoria Bampton]

I'm definitely interested to take a look. Do you want to drop them on my FTP server? http://ftp.victoriabampton.com:8'8'

 

[andersl]

I'm definitely interested to take a look. Do you want to drop them on my FTP server? http://ftp.victoriabampton.com:8'8'

Great! I just uploaded the original JPEG picture, as well as two screen dumps of LR and Firefox, respectively.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

I've just had a look, and 2 things jump out at me.

1. The screenshot you sent of the way LR is viewing the image looks identical (at least at screen res) to the outputted file. That's exactly what I'd expect.

2. The file you outputted is in AdobeRGB colour space. Firefox isn't colour managed, and nor are most Windows browsers (I'm guessing ThumbsPlus isn't either). That means that the files will look different in those programs. That's not a Lightroom issue, that's just colour management. Try exporting to sRGB and you should find they match pretty closely.

3. I can see the green gradations you mention. Too late at night here for me to make such sense, so I'll leave that for someone else to jump in on, and we'll discuss further tomorrow if it's all been quiet! That's NOT a colour management issue, but I can't get the words right! :roll:

Does that narrow it down a bit for you?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

PS. I meant to say, if you liked the way Firefox showed those files, trying dropping the saturation in LR to match on those images.

 

[andersl]

PS. I meant to say, if you liked the way Firefox showed those files, trying dropping the saturation in LR to match on those images.

Thanks, the dropping the saturation made this look a lot better!

However, I'm still a bit concerned -- I often import a batch of photos, adjust a few and then export the result. So far I've expected that "what goes in, comes out". In this case there is a big discrepancy.

In fact, the pattern and the areas with distinct edges that showed up made me a bit worried. When moving the saturation slider one sees that the area, almost dot by dot, goes from dark green to light green. I would have expected a smooth surface, where the transition would use more nuances (like it does in the lower end of the scale).

Again, thanks for taking a look at this!

 

[Mark Sirota]

Try turning the sharpening all the way down to zero and export at 1''% quality with the contrain box unchecked -- you might be seeing sharpening, compression, and/or resizing artifacts resulting from sharpening/compressing/resizing an already sharpened and compressed file. That might tell us where the problem lies.

Or export in "Original" format instead of JPEG (in which case you'll lose your Develop adjustments, but you'll keep your Library metadata). I'm not clear what sorts of "adjustments" you're making, which is why I suggest this.

 

[andersl]

Try turning the sharpening all the way down to zero and export at 1''% quality with the contrain box unchecked -- you might be seeing sharpening, compression, and/or resizing artifacts resulting from sharpening/compressing/resizing an already sharpened and compressed file. That might tell us where the problem lies.

Or export in "Original" format instead of JPEG (in which case you'll lose your Develop adjustments, but you'll keep your Library metadata). I'm not clear what sorts of "adjustments" you're making, which is why I suggest this.

I'm exporting the photo straight from the "import" state, I have not done any adjustments in LR what so ever. This means that the sharpening slider is all the way down to the bottom. (I think this should rule out that this is a repacking problem.)

I did some experimenting on my own and found something really interesting. When exporting the file in "original" format, or when exporting the file as a JPEG in AdobeRGB mode, the photo, when viewed in Firefox looks good.

On the other hand, exporting the photo under the sRGB color space results in a picture that contains the exact same mosaic pattern as shown in LR.

This discovery has made me somewhat relieved, it means that I can "tunnel" pictures through LR without losing image quality.

On the other hand, this means that if I export the file as AdobeRGB, what other people are seeing could differ quite a lot from what I see when working in LR, which isn't an ideal situation...

The picture in question comes straight from my Canon 2'D and it is originally taken using the AbodeRGB color space.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Ok, for a start, you'll want to stop using Firefox to display anything other than sRGB files. Use Preview on your Mac by all means, or another colour managed program on your PC such as Photoshop. And it's probably worth doing a search on 'colour space' so you understand exactly what the difference is. It's a fascinating colour management education!

I did some experimenting on my own and found something really interesting. When exporting the file in "original" format, or when exporting the file as a JPEG in AdobeRGB mode, the photo, when viewed in Firefox looks good.

I think you'll find that colour management is probably at the root of your problem here actually. Taking Lightroom out of the equation altogether for a minute, am I right in thinking that you've been shooting AdobeRGB in camera until now? And then you've been viewing the files in Firefox? If so, you're actually seeing an incorrect rendering of those files.

What you are seeing in Lightroom IS the correct rendering of the file. If you were to open it into Photoshop with it correctly reading the embedded profile, you should get the same result.

And if you want to prove it to yourself, open the file in Photoshop, making sure it's assigned the AdobeRGB colour space. (Edit > Assign Profile > AdobeRGB). If your colour settings are set correctly, it should have already read that embedded profile anyway. Now try falsely assigning the sRGB profile (Edit > Assign Profile > sRGB). Now it looks just like it did in Firefox. Have a read through this for a clearer explanation of what's happening. http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page1/

So end result - adjust your pictures in LR to the way you want them to be. You're not 'losing image quality' any more than you are by assigning a false profile. And if you want to send them to someone else, export them as sRGB so they see exactly the same as you do.

 

[andersl]

I think you'll find that colour management is probably at the root of your problem here actually

I can't argue with that logic -- I basically came to that conclusion myself after giving it some thought yesterday.

On the other hand, lets take Firefox (and other tools using the wrong color space) out of the equation, and focus on the badly rendered picture. I've never seen a situation where an area that is "smooth" is rendered using such a mosaic pattern...

I guess I just stumbled into the JPEG limitation wall, too bad I didn't shoot RAW back then.

Thanks for all your help!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

That's called Noise - caused by shooting at ISO32'' on a Canon 2'd. A program like Noise Ninja will smooth that out nicely. Even raw wouldn't help much in this situation. It's simply a limitation of the cameras sensor in low light conditions - it's like using ISO 32'' film - grain would be very obvious in that situation.

 

[Mark Sirota]

Now try falsely assigning the sRGB profile (Edit > Assign Profile > sRGB). Now it looks just like it did in Firefox.

Actually, that's not quite true -- it's worse that that. I've been meaning to correct you on this for the last several days, Victoria...

It's not that Firefox renders everything in sRGB, which is what you've been saying. The fact, is, Firefox doesn't know anything at all about color management, it just sends stuff to the video driver with no color management at all. It's just that this normally results in an appearance similar to color-managed sRGB, but not the same. You can see this if you look at an sRGB image in Firefox and Safari side-by-side.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Very true Mark. You have a very nice clear way of putting things Mark! Thanks for clarifying!