Thanks to digital cameras, I know shoot a lot more than I used to (well, I was shooting a couple of rolls a year).
I still shoot a few subject JPEG only by I start to use RAW more often. My default colorspace is Adobe RGB.
My workflow is pretty simple: I import my photos in folders then browse and auto-rotate all the pictures with ACDSee (lossless operation). I view the pictures with ACDSee viewer, and I edit file with PhotoShop.
I was sometimes disappointed with the colors of some pictures. I was even more disappointed when a friend of mine shoot the same subject with a D70 and gave me the files. Colors were much "punchier", mine looked dull...
I've been investigating a little and it seems that at some point, the colorspace information is lost and files are interpreted as sRGB... It does not appear for all pictures but many are affected.
As far as I have investigated, it seems that there are two ways to specify the colorspace for a JPEG file :
- as an image attribute (included profile).
- as an EXIF information (Primary Chromacities)
When the EOS 10D saves a file, it only sets the Primary Chromacities. I see two problems with this method :
- ACDSee and many other tools (Windows) don't use this EXIF property correctly.
- ACDSee was buggy at some point and EXIF data have been modified : event PS did not recognize some pictures as Adobe RGB.
I'm a little confused with all that. How do you guys work with Adobe RGB files ? Have you encountered any similar problem ?
By the way, I'm looking for a simple tool to set colorspace of a bunch of files without having to uncompress-recompress the JPEG data. Does anyone know any utility like this ? I just would like to include a profile within all my JPEGs so that ACDSee interprets them correctly.