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Web gallery with other color profiles (like AdobeRGB)

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Ruahrc

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I recently played with and successfully uploaded a LR-created web gallery to some webspace I have. Really slick! I really liked how it can go straight from the NEFs direct to uploaded JPGs with no intervention on my behalf other than supplying the server address and password. And the results looking way better than alternatives like Google Picasa. Previously I had been considering purchasing some space on Pbase.com to share photos with family and friends but with LR's built in web gallery feature I won't need to.

Anyways, I did encounter one thing in my testing of a few galleries. I have some photos which do not downsample to sRGB properly and have some color shift in them when done so. When I have printed these images in the past, I exported the file using the AdobeRGB colorspace and everything was great.

But I don't see any option to specify the output color profile for web galleries? I know that the web runs sRGB by default, but the way I see it- those people with color-aware browsers (quite a lot nowadays, as most modern browsers do respect color profiles) will get to see my pics properly, while those who don't will be defaulting into sRGB anyways, which they would have seen if my images were embedded as sRGB in the first place.

Am I missing this feature? Or is it not implemented? If not, I think it would be a relatively easy feature to add, and very useful.

Also, another great feature to add to web galleries would be the ability to password protect galleries, so they could be posted on the web and only be viewed by family/friends who knew the password. I know there are some workarounds for this but I was not able to figure them out and it would be nice to have that ability built into LR. Do you think that something like this is within the scope of LR or is it something that really should be handled by the web server?
 
You're misunderstanding what will be seen in an unmanaged environment.

It's not accurate to say "the web runs sRGB by default." In fact, as you noted, the web generally doesn't support color management at all. sRGB is recommended for the web because it's the one that will look least bad in an unmanaged environment, but it'll still be wrong if there's no color management.

If you view Adobe RGB in an unmanaged environment, it'll look flat and desaturated. If you view ProPhoto RGB in an unmanaged environment, it'll look absolutely horrible. sRGB, on the other hand, has at least a chance of looking decent.

I could imagine that if you know that your viewers all use color-managed browsers on a calibrated wide-gamut monitor, it might make sense to upload in something other than sRGB. Since very few people have that luxury, support for that possibility isn't much of a priority for the Lightroom developers.
 
Your point about viewing an AdobeRGB file in an unmanaged environment is well taken. I wonder though how many people are viewing the web with unmanaged browsers anymore. IE7 is color managed, and probably takes care of most windows users. Firefox 3 can be if you enable the option. Safari for the mac is color managed too...

I think the problem nowadays lies more with images that don't have an icc profile embedded in them, rather than a browser that does not support reading of embedded profiles?

What do you mean when you refer to users viewing with a calibrated wide-gamut monitor? Is the only time AdobeRGB advantageous if you're viewing with a wide-gamut monitor? My computer, a Powerbook G4, while calibrated is certainly not wide gamut. But for some of my images, if I convert them to sRGB the blue sky turns purple, but if I keep it in AdobeRGB it displays fine.

Norman
 
Your point about viewing an AdobeRGB file in an unmanaged environment is well taken. I wonder though how many people are viewing the web with unmanaged browsers anymore. IE7 is color managed, and probably takes care of most windows users. Firefox 3 can be if you enable the option. Safari for the mac is color managed too...

I think the problem nowadays lies more with images that don't have an icc profile embedded in them, rather than a browser that does not support reading of embedded profiles?

What do you mean when you refer to users viewing with a calibrated wide-gamut monitor? Is the only time AdobeRGB advantageous if you're viewing with a wide-gamut monitor? My computer, a Powerbook G4, while calibrated is certainly not wide gamut. But for some of my images, if I convert them to sRGB the blue sky turns purple, but if I keep it in AdobeRGB it displays fine.

Norman

Do not believe IE7 is color managed. Firefox 3 however, as you noted if its turned on, is managed. You can clearly see the difference between the two here: http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter
 
IE7 is color managed, and probably takes care of most windows users. ... Safari for the mac is color managed too...

No version of IE for Windows, including IE8, is color-managed. I think IE 5.5 for the Mac may have been color-managed, but it's been gone a long time and I could be misremembering. Safari is color-managed on both platforms.

I think the problem nowadays lies more with images that don't have an icc profile embedded in them, rather than a browser that does not support reading of embedded profiles?

Certainly there are a lot of images out there with no embedded profile and no profile tags. Photoshop's Save For Web generally strips them out (recent versions can be configured to leave them in), and many people strip them to make their files smaller, since most browsers don't support color management anyway.

Unfortunately, this is the wrong strategy. We should be preparing for the day when most browsers do support color management by leaving embedded profiles in. Fortunately, Lightroom always embeds the profile.

What do you mean when you refer to users viewing with a calibrated wide-gamut monitor? Is the only time AdobeRGB advantageous if you're viewing with a wide-gamut monitor? My computer, a Powerbook G4, while calibrated is certainly not wide gamut. But for some of my images, if I convert them to sRGB the blue sky turns purple, but if I keep it in AdobeRGB it displays fine.

When displayed with what software?

Perhaps I was a bit over-general there -- certainly some monitors we wouldn't consider wide-gamut could exceed sRGB in some colors. While rare, it could happen.
 
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