Weird desaturation issue

[jazzman161]

Hey guys. So I've been developing my workflow and I'm getting things down pretty well. This weekend I got a new lens for my D3'' (5'mm f/1.4D) and played around with it in RAW, like I've been practicing.

I load the RAW up in lightroom. I don't like any of the nikon loaded presets as starting point so I leave it on Adobe Standard and edit. Everything comes out peachy, and I export to JPG, hi quality. The end result picture, when uploaded or opened through Windows, looks horrible. NOTHING like what I editted.

So I went back to my other RAW files that I did the same workflow on and now they're ALL coming out looking nothing like what I edit them to be. I'm even increasing saturation up to 1'' and when I export, either to TIF or JPG, they don't look anything like in Lightroom.

I don't recall changing any settings in the last week. Any ideas what this issue could be?

And here's something really weird. When I look at the exported TIF or JPG in the Windows mini-preview through windows, it looks exactly like how I editted it. If I double click and open in either Picasa viewer or Windows Image Viewer, shitty picture.

 

[Mark Sirota]

Picasa and Windows Image Viewer are not color-managed, so you shouldn't expect them to look the same. If they look wildly different, then you're probably not exporting in sRGB.

 

[jazzman161]

Mark, Thanks! That's exactly what it was. Somehow all my export presets got changed to ProPhotoRGB. Changed it sRGB and all is good.

What do you mean those programs are not color-managed? I admit, my knowledge when it comes to color space is limited.

 

[Mark Sirota]

I tried to come up with a concise definition of color management, but failed -- so here's Wikipedia's explanation.

 

[jazzman161]

Thanks for the link Mark. It's slowly making more sense.