Issues with color when exporting

[JinxedStudios]

Hi! New to the forum, but I've poked around some to see if anyone else is having this issue, and I'm thinking it must just be something stupid I've done and overlooked somehow. I edited a bunch of pictures yesterday, got them all the way I wanted, exported, and BAM- Waaaaay off of how they looked inside of LR4. (I should tell you, I've been using LR3 for about a year and a half now, so I'm not a total newbie!) I'm sure this must be something to do with color profiles or something, but I've looked everywhere and can't figure it out.
Here's a step by step of what happened yesterday when I was trying to find the problem:

1. I edited my photos in lightroom, got them all pretty and ready to go.

2. I exported them, same as I always do, and went to the folder where they are saved to take a look.

3. I freaked out. {lol} I went back to LR to see if I had inadvertently changed my export settings. {didn't.}

4. I exported a few of the photos a second time to make sure it wasn't a glitch.

5. I begged my photog friends on fb for help. (no dice.)

6. I made this for comparison:
See what I mean? The exported photo is all red and weird, while the LR screenshot is pretty! (The weird thing is, when I pulled the exported photo into PS, it looked right! I had to change a setting (think it was a proof setting) to get it to look like it did in my windows photo viewer, so that I could give the example.)

7. I changed the export color space to the ProPhotoRGB, and exported again. (Hadn't noticed that before.)

8. Viola! Picture looks right in my photo viewer!! Travel on over to Facebook to post my photo, thrilled that I figured it out!

9. Post photo- back to red and weird.

10. Come here, begging for help!

Thank you for reading this, and I REALLY hope you can help me to retain what little sanity I have left!

 

[clee01l]

Jinxed Welcome to the forum. Firstly, LR is a color manager application. It works most correctly when you calibrated your monitor with a color calibration tool Like Spyder or i1Pro Display. Next, viewing on the computer with an application that is not color managed can yield unexpected results. All of the Photo viewing tools that ship with Windows are pretty much useless. An Image imported to Flickr can be viewed by anyone on all sorts of poorly calibrated monitors and unless your browser is color aware, the colors can look radically different from what you see in LR. It is best to upload to Flickr using the sRGB color space. As for browsers.
Safari is color managed. IE9 and Firefox can be but may need to be tweaked to turn on the feature. GoogleChrome is not managed.

So, are you calibrating your monitor?
Outside of LR are you viewing local images using a Color aware viewer?
On your Flickr uploads, Upload as sRGB and view the image with diffferent browsers including Safari, IE9, Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Compare this with an image that used ProPhotoRGB and see which browser produce the most consistent image color across all the browsers that your viewers might view.

 

[JinxedStudios]

I know about the calibration and all of that. I've been using LR3 for about a year and a half, and I've NEVER had this issue. All of my photos when exported from LR4 have a red tint to them. If it were an issue with calibration, wouldn't it stand to reason that I would have had this problem with previous versions of LR?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi JinxedStudios, welcome to the forum! Cute picture!

When you changed the proof setting in Photoshop, what did you change it to? Monitor RGB by any chance? And which looked like LR - with the proof setting turned on or now?

My first guess would be a calibration problem too, so it would be worth ruling that out as a starting point. Stranger things have happened!!!! What did you say you're using to calibrate? Have you tried setting your monitor profile to sRGB? I'd also check graphics card settings/driver too. A background update could explain it.

Do your Facebook friends see the red or proper version on their own screens?

 

[JinxedStudios]

Just updating- seems that fixing the color profiles to better line up in-camera and in LR fixed it! I haven't had any further issues, and I've edited about 6 sessions since then... lol Still kinda scratching my head on that one set of photos, but I have the rest fixed. Thanks for your help!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Excellent, thanks for the update!

 

[Mark Sirota]

Just updating- seems that fixing the color profiles to better line up in-camera and in LR fixed it!

I just want to clarify -- what, exactly, fixed it? One of Victoria's suggestions, setting your monitor profile to sRGB, was only a diagnostic technique, not a solution. If that's what fixed it, there's still more to do...