Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: Roberta Frederick on July 16, 2013, 04:35:19 pm
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I apologize if this topic has been discussed previously but I couldn't find the answer to my problem by using the search mechanism for this forum. I am using two Mac computers a Mac Pro desktop and a MacBook Pro Laptop. Both are running OS X10.6. I do my photo work on the desktop with a NEC P221W as the main display - the second display is an old Dell display that I use for palettes, etc. I calibrate the NEC with the Spectraview II. The laptop is calibrated with a Xrite iOne.
I've had this problem from the start and have searched online numerous times for a solution but so far have not found one. I use a photo editing target when working with my photos. They look great on the NEC display - they even look pretty good on the second Dell display, although darker. The problem is when I want to use the photos on the web and view them on a computer other than the Mac Pro desktop computer. Generally they look pretty good unless there is red or some shade of red in the photo and then things get ugly. I've tried various ways of doing this - converting to sRGB, not converting to sRGB, using Photoshop Save for Web & Devices, not using Save for Web, and on and on. Actually, without even putting a photo with red coloring on the web but just viewing it on my laptop I can see if it is going to be oversaturated. What I've noticed is that no matter what I do or how I try to change or convert the photo for use on the web they all turn out looking pretty much the same. I've even gone so far as to desaturate the reds in a photo before converting to sRGB, etc. Sometimes that helps a bit but things still look gawdy to my eye and there seems to be loss of detail in those things that are red. As an example: I did this with a photo not too long ago - when I view it on Flickr from the desktop the reds as I desaturated them appear a soft pink but when I view them from the laptop on Flickr the red is bright pink/red and some detail is lost.
I don't use the desktop computer on the web that often but when I do my photos (and the photos of others) look good whether I am using the sRGB emulation target or the Photo Editing target when viewing from Firefox. When I use the laptop (Firefox) to view a site such as Flickr I notice the over saturation in reds - not only in my photos but often in the photos of others. Then on the other hand I see other photos on Flickr with reds and they look as they should regardless of how vivid the reds might be. This problem doesn't necessarily seem browser specific since I notice the change if I drop a photo on my laptop desktop or if I drop it into an email and send it back to myself. I could accept it if it means that these photos only look a bit funky on my laptop but I feel quite certain they probably look the same way to others and it really spoils putting certain photos on the Web for me.
Is there a way to make this better? In other words to make my photos with reds display better on the web? If so, what can I do? I realize color management is a complicated subject but I am really struggling here. If someone would care to respond and perhaps could keep it on the simple side for a fix if there is one I would appreciate it greatly.
Thanks,
Roberta
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Hello and Welcome,
My Mac is only used for music work and is not connected to the web, so my reply may not be of much use. I do have an almost-calibrated NEC 1990SX, though. ;-)
It would help others here if you would say whether you are shooting JPEG images or RAW or both.
You do not mention printing. For web shots to be published (which is all I do) I strongly recommend that you start, edit and end in sRGB. And make sure that the end product has an ICC profile embedded in it. So, head to the camera, select sRGB (not Adobe) and JPEG "fine". Take a shot and bring it into PhotoShop's sRGB working space (heresy to many folks) do your editing and save it as a JPEG, quality 9 but no less than 5, and make sure that in the 'save' dialog the little box that says "ICC profile sRGB IEC, etc etc is checked".
Since we're only concerned with color accuracy, I'll not go into 8-bit versus 16-bit, soft-proofing, printing etc which won't help you at this stage. Divide and conquer!
I'll put up two images in a minute, one with embedded profile one not. Let me know how they look on your monitors.
(http://kronometric.org/phot/profile/tomato not emb.jpg)(http://kronometric.org/phot/profile/tomato emb.jpg)
Image at right was cropped and over-saturated to bring up the red. Hue was adjusted to make it "redder" (wasn't ripe). Image at left is identical but saved without an embedded profile. How they look?
On my monitor they look the same. (FireFox 22, XP Pro SP3). Even in Explorer 9!
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Hi Ted,
Thanks for the reply. I shoot in raw and usually import to Lightroom 4 first. One reason is I haven't installed the upgrade to CS6 yet and CS5 can't read my NEF files. My working space is ProPhoto RGB and I've been converting to sRGB/jpeg for the web - usually in Save for the Web, although I've tried using Convert to Profile as well. I do print photos for my own use and am using a Canon Pixma printer (guessing and crossing my fingers quite often) so yes, for now let's just discuss converting my photos for the web. When you post your photos I will open up Firefox on both computers at the same time and will let you know what I see. I will also try as you suggest take a shot and edit in sRGB to see what happens and will let you know after I get that accomplished. Hopefully I won't have to do that all of the time but we'll see what happens.
Thanks again,
Roberta
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Hi Roberta, welcome to the Luminous Landscape!
You are correct in that the issue is all about colour-management!
One of the issues that you have is that once your image is out of the colour-managed environment of CS or Lightroom or whatever else you are using to edit images then it is the Wild West out there.
Many of the applications that one can view images with including some browsers are not colour-managed.
The best you can do is to properly soft-proof an image using sRGB as the profile.
In a colour-managed application viewing an image that you have correctly soft-proofed on the NEC (that you have, I assume, properly calibrated and profiled) that image should look pretty good - as close to the master copy as possible.
This is not primarily a problem associated with your monitor (as long as the caveat mentioned above holds).
There are many heavyweights in colour-management who frequent this forum so it is more than likely that one or more will comment.
Tony Jay
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When you post your photos I will open up Firefox on both computers at the same time and will let you know what I see. I will also try as you suggest take a shot and edit in sRGB to see what happens and will let you know after I get that accomplished. Hopefully I won't have to do that all of the time but we'll see what happens.
I edited my first post to show the test images, and added another two here.
Hello Roberta, I used to use ProPhoto but had problems with color clipping in some flower shots when converting to sRGB.
Again, just to check your monitors, here's a couple of identical (content) images:
(http://kronometric.org/phot/profile/yf1PP.jpg)(http://kronometric.org/phot/profile/yf1ProPhotoNoProfile.jpg)
They should different - one 'washed out' (no profile).
The previously posted images should look about the same to you, unless your monitors are 'wide gamut'. Is that what the 'W' means?
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Ted,
Re your photos on my MacBook Pro laptop the embedded profile looks much more red and on the Mac Pro desktop and NEC monitor they look the same. I tried switching the NEC back and forth between sRGB emulation and Photo Editing targets and they still look the same. Also on the laptop your not embedded photo looks a little more washed out than on the NEC. Now I'm really confused. I calibrated both machines this morning - could it be that the calibration device I am using for the laptop is not working right or....?
Thanks,
Roberta
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Ted,
Yes, the NEC is wide gamut.
Re the flower image - now there is a difference in both on both machines. That said on the laptop the more vivid copy does show a more orange or reddish cast at the center of the flower - it looks much better on the NEC. There is also a difference in the desaturated copy - on the laptop the color has a bit of a grayish cast and on the NEC more of a green cast but looks better than the one on the laptop. That probably wouldn't be unexpected but it is interesting to note that the laptop is still showing a bit more color in the red range.
Roberta
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Ted,
Re your photos on my MacBook Pro laptop the embedded profile looks much more red and on the Mac Pro desktop and NEC monitor they look the same. I tried switching the NEC back and forth between sRGB emulation and Photo Editing targets and they still look the same. Also on the laptop your not embedded photo looks a little more washed out than on the NEC. Now I'm really confused. I calibrated both machines this morning - could it be that the calibration device I am using for the laptop is not working right or....?
Here's where the afore-mentioned heavyweights need to step in, because I don't calibrate my monitors other than play with the color gammas occasionally. (I don't print, so I don't feel the need).
As far as the laptop is concerned, the only thing that springs to my mind is that, for some reason, a double profiling is taking place i.e. the Color Management Module on the laptop is applying the sRGB profile but something else is applying it again before sending it to the laptop monitor driver.
On the laptop, does the profiled image show up too red in every application on the laptop that can show images? If so that points to the screen driver which is used by all applications.
Just read your latest post - comments above still valid, IMHO. The flower showing a reddish cast is saying that there may a hue shift in favor of red. New can of worms, that :-(
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Hi Tony,
Thanks for the reply. So are you saying I need to soft proof to make any changes before posting them to a site like Flickr? I don't quite understand how soft proofing will make a difference but I'm willing to try anything. Often when it is a photo I really like I just wind up converting it to black and white - I can post an example from my Flickr photostream if you don't mind viewing it that way. I am in the middle of a project there and this is one from that project. It would be interesting to know if others see the red on the monkey's foot as very bright red with sort of fuschia tones in the center- that is the way it appears to me on the laptop but on the NEC it is more pastel and shows detail. I also converted this to black and white and the detail is more like it is on the NEC.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/desertmules/9181854608/in/photostream
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I just remembered this - probably a better example but this shows the difference I am seeing and I am viewing both in Firefox only on the laptop. The first one looks like it does on my NEC even though I am viewing it on the laptop and the second one is the way images with red turn out when I view them on the laptop - whether dropped on the desktop, Flickr, email or most other for the web applications.
I brought the saturation on this photo down because it looked so bad on Flickr, Facebook or email and this is as it appears on the NEC and Pinterest:
http://pinterest.com/pin/7248049372407187/
Same photo - nothing changed but as it appears on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/desertmules/8475232322/in/photostream
Do others see a difference? This is crazy making.
Thanks,
Roberta
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Do others see a difference?
Roberta
I saw no difference. However, was able to download from Pinterest and the image there has no EXIF and no embedded profile.
How does this one look on the laptop? (I added a profile)
(http://kronometric.org/phot/profile/robertas dog conv JPG ICC emb.jpg)
On the laptop, does an image look too red in every application that can show images?
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It would be interesting to know if others see the red on the monkey's foot as very bright red with sort of fuschia tones in the center
It too looked OK on my monitor. That's a pretty good description of color clipping, IMHO.
[PS] I just looked at your doggie image in ColorThink. All colors are well within the sRGB 3D gamut - except some light pinks just at the edge of the sRGB gamut at about a lightness of 70 out of 100.
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I looked at the image on Safari, Firefox and dropped it onto an email and they all look too red - particularly the center of the flower which has the fuchsia look in the darkest areas and the heart looks sort of mottled - not smooth color as it appears on the NEC. For the heck of it I opened this page on the NEC too just to see if it looks right there and it does.
You said the images look the same to you whether on Pinterest or Flickr so are they showing the fuchsia cast as I described above?
thanks,
Roberta
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You said the images look the same to you whether on Pinterest or Flickr so are they showing the fuchsia cast as I described above?
No, they all look fine on my monitor in FF which is color-managed by default. That is to say, pastel colors, good detail, no blotches no fuschia not that I'm sure what that is :-(
Have you tried opening an image in a non-browser application on the laptop? Do they still have MacPaint? (probably not!). Do you have an editor on the laptop? Does the Finder show images these days? How do they look? Still too Red?
I envisage a problem with rendering on the laptop. What is not clear to me is whether it is all applications, indicating a monitor profile problem, or just one application - which seems unlikely because you said it was the same in FF and in Safari.
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Hi Tony,
Thanks for the reply. So are you saying I need to soft proof to make any changes before posting them to a site like Flickr? I don't quite understand how soft proofing will make a difference but I'm willing to try anything.
I don't know for sure if Flickr is colour-managed (I don't post there) but I think it is likely that it is.
A quick perusal should clarify that. Even if Flickr is colour-managed you can bet your bottom dollar that the millions who view your images are viewing them on unprofiled, uncalibrated monitors anyway.
Either way, knowing that an image is softproofed appropriately for its output should give you confidence that it will look its best. If you don't softproof then you have no idea how the outputted image should look. Changing the colourspace will potentially changes how the image looks in output. Whether the output is to print or the web the principle is exactly the same. This is what you have discovered. Softproofing minimizes and potentially eliminates this problem - this is what it is there to do.
I would also strongly counter the advice that you are receiving about editing images in Lightroom in the sRGB colourspace and any suggestion that one 'cannot' softproof when sRGB is the output colourspace. This is not true.
The bottom line is: control what you can.
Tony Jay
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I should have thought of this earlier.
On this very website is the best primer on colour-management that I know of.
Buy and download the tutorial series called "Camera to Print and Screen"
The whole thing is several hours long but it is broken down into manageable episodes.
The absolute beauty of these tutorials is that a realtime explanation of the actual workflow involved is covered.
This is not free advertising for the Luminous Landscape - this resource absolutely stands on its own merits!
Tony Jay
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Ted,
Yes, the NEC is wide gamut.
. . That said, on the laptop the more vivid copy does show a more orange or reddish cast at the center of the flower - it looks much better on the NEC. There is also a difference in the desaturated copy . . .
At the risk of over-posting, I'm hoping that you understood that the two flower images are identical and have identical color data, the only difference being the presence or absence of the ProPhoto color profile. By that I mean that the profiled image was not made more vivid by editing and neither was the unprofiled image de-saturated by editing.
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Hi Ted,
Yes, I did understand that - thanks. Still mulling/processing all of this.
Roberta
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Thanks Tony I'll check out the tutorial. Whew! This is not easy and I'd much prefer an easy button but since that doesn't exist I'll keep plugging away.
Roberta
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Roberta just enjoy the tutorials.
They may be information rich but they are also hugely entertaining and easy to follow!
Once you have caught the concepts you will realize that it isn't actually hard - one just needs to be informed.
Tony Jay
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Ted,
You posted again but I don't see it now...I have been dealing with an external drive that is threatening to crash or something so had a bunch of backups to do. I also stayed up very late last night so I could download the videos Tony talked about so I was moving slow today. Big download and I waited to do it after midnight when my internet service has free time until 5 AM.
I looked at a photo with a lot of red a couple of different ways on the laptop - in Preview and in iPhoto and it looks too red in both of those. I don't have Photoshop or Lightroom on the laptop so I can't see if there is a difference there but in the Apple type applications it is too red.
Thanks,
Roberta
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Ted,
You posted again but I don't see it now...I have been dealing with an external drive that is threatening to crash or something so had a bunch of backups to do. I also stayed up very late last night so I could download the videos Tony talked about so I was moving slow today. Big download and I waited to do it after midnight when my internet service has free time until 5 AM.
I looked at a photo with a lot of red a couple of different ways on the laptop - in Preview and in iPhoto and it looks too red in both of those. I don't have Photoshop or Lightroom on the laptop so I can't see if there is a difference there but in the Apple type applications it is too red.
Roberta,
Up a bit late myself today. From what you've said so far, it seems that anybody's sRGB image is showing incorrectly on the laptop irrespective of which application is used to display it on the laptop screen. And by sRGB image I mean an image with sRGB data, whether with an embedded ICC profile or not.
The likely cause of that is the one thing that is common to all applications on the laptop that can show images - and that one thing would be the system profile and I'm sorry to say that I don't where that lives on a Mac but maybe Googling "ColorSync" might get you somewhere. Do you know if there's any way to undo your recent monitor profiling and revert somehow to the laptop default? Someone here should be able to tell us, I would have thought. Anybody?
The point being that the laptop default profile should not be too far off - ceretainly not nearly as bad as what you're reporting. Especially for plain old sRGB images. If the default is OK (not necessarily perfect) then the problem lies in the monitor profile (as it now) - not in the desktop, not in the desktop applications and not in any images properly created thereby.
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Ted,
These were run through Save for the Web in PS at different settings - on the laptop there is a difference between the first and the others, the last two look pretty much the same even though the settings were a little different. There is a difference in Firefox (on Flickr), in Safari (on Flickr) and in Preview. BTW before I forget to mention it I did not have this color difference when I was using my old Dell Monitor but it is not wide gamut. Do you see a difference in these photos? All the same except for the way I ran them through Save for the Web.
In this forum they all look the same to me in this post but maybe because I've been looking at it too long. I was all set to go to sleep tonight when it occurred to me that some of the problem could be the way I am saving for the web but now that I see there is no difference appearing here I am ready to bang my head against a wall. There is a difference in Flickr and in Preview on the laptop so it doesn't make sense. Will play with this again in a day or two and see what happens. Going to get some shut eye and try to forget about this for a while.
Roberta
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All three of those look the same to me viewed in my browser on my Dell Windows laptop. Using Firefox with color management turned on, standard LCD screen, display calibrated with the original i1 Display. Firefox defaults to sRGB for untagged images so all three are being viewed in the sRGB color space. Then downloading the full-sized images and opening them in ACDsee shows a difference depending on the default profile selected. The tagged sRGB image doesn't change but the two untagged images become much more red and saturated when the default profile in the viewer is set to aRGB or ProPhoto. There's significant loss of detail and blocking in the tomatoes. Setting the viewer's default profile for untagged images to sRGB makes them all look the same again.
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Steve, Roberta,
I too downloaded the three images. They all look virtually the same in my applications because the image data appears to be the same in all three. I also looked in ColorThink and each image is color-clipped at several areas of the sRGB 3D color-space, mostly reds, also blues and even some almost-whites. Probably due to a relative-colorimetric conversion from ProPhoto to sRGB color space.
My only suggestion is to always embed an ICC profile, otherwise any viewer's app will do what it wants with your image rather than using your own profile - even if it's just sRGB. You've already seen that with my yellow flowers earlier. The right-hand image data was in ProPhoto color space and the browser showed it as sRGB. I'll try to explain why . . .
Let's say the actual color of the flower in "independent" space is X,Y,Z. In a wide gamut RGB space that might be 150, 150, 25. In sRGB that same color appearance might be given as 200, 200, 15. If you display a wide gamut file with a pixel at 150, 150, 25 on your sRGB monitor without an embedded profile, the pixel will look wrong - mainly it will look un-saturated and even a bit color-shifted . . . because the RGB numbers of 150, 150, 25 are not the correct ones for the afore-mentioned actual XYZ color. Steve has described the opposite of that effect where sRGB color values become more saturated in appearance when used in wider color spaces.
Have you (Roberta) considered using the sRGB emulation setting on your wide gamut monitor? But I suppose the wider gamut is more useful for soft-proofing print files?
Good luck,
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Let's say the actual color of the flower in "independent" space is X,Y,Z. In a wide gamut RGB space that might be 150, 150, 25. In sRGB that same color appearance might be given as 200, 200, 15. If you display a wide gamut file with a pixel at 150, 150, 25 on your sRGB monitor without an embedded profile, the pixel will look wrong - mainly it will look un-saturated and even a bit color-shifted . . . because the RGB numbers of 150, 150, 25 are not the correct ones for the afore-mentioned actual XYZ color. Steve has described the opposite of that effect where sRGB color values become more saturated in appearance when used in wider color spaces.
A tiny bell is ringing in my mind and Steve provided the clue:
If you have profiled your NEC to a wide gamut color space then an sRGB image without an embedded profile will show up more saturated on the NEC screen. That is to say that a red from your latest image e.g. RGB 245, 52, 1 is well-saturated. Those same RGB numbers shown on a wide-gamut monitor would be expected to look just as you have described.
Now if you show an image with an embedded sRGB profile on your laptop, it should look OK, which I believe you have effectively said earlier. If an image with an embedded sRGB profile on your laptop does not look OK, then the application displaying the image is not color-managed.
I believe we are getting close . . .
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Found this old article re the display - it is two pages: http://www.shutterbug.com/content/nec-spectraview-ii-color-system-best-system-price
After playing around with this last night I think I need to figure the best way to convert to sRGB and stick with that. For some of the photos depending upon how I started out when converting even checking "embed profile" did not seem to make a difference so perhaps it is really not embedding the profile depending upon other settings. This is what I probably need to sort out.
When I first got the display nearly everything I viewed on the web seemed overly saturated regardless of which target I used. I recently upgraded the firmware for the Spectraview and that seemed to improve what I see on the screen - once I recalibrated. It seems obvious there is something that happens depending upon what settings I use in Photoshop "Save for the Web". It still doesn't make a lot of sense to me because right now I feel like I am pushing buttons and crossing my fingers. I have some photos that really looked bad when I tried to convert them for the web and I want to retry them to see what happens. If I can just get the way I set things really established in my mind I may be able to muddle along with posting to my Flickr project while I am learning more about color. Regardless of how I set things up in Save for the web the photos all look fine on the NEC. It appears that even when I do something that looks terrible on the laptop the NEC seems to be able to translate it properly, does that make sense? I did notice with some of the settings I applied last night, viewing those in sRGB on the NEC (from the desktop in Preview), that they appear a bit more vivid and when those photos are viewed on the laptop the color appears more "correct". So perhaps I am getting close to a temporary band-aid to use? I mainly use Lightroom and the recommendation is to use ProPhoto as the working setting.
I did start watching the Camera to Print to Screen videos last night but only got through the first two. The bantering between the two men gets a bit tiresome so I hope the entire 12 hours isn't that way. I'm sure there is very good information in these videos and I am going to work my way through the entire series eventually but it's a lot of material to digest and will take a while I am sure.
I certainly appreciate all of the help I am receiving it's a relief to be getting a little closer to being able to work this out.
Roberta
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The likely cause of that is the one thing that is common to all applications on the laptop that can show images - and that one thing would be the system profile and I'm sorry to say that I don't where that lives on a Mac but maybe Googling "ColorSync" might get you somewhere
What is 'the System Profile'?
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Opening Colorsync Utility on a Mac and clicking on the Profiles tab there is a list under System: Adobe RGB (1998), generic CMYK Profile, Generic Gray Gamma 2.2 Profile, Generic Gray Profile, Generic RGB Profile Generic XYZ Profile. Clicking on one of those brings up Profile Information on the right hand side. For sRGB IEC61966-2.1 it shows the Path System/Library/ColorSync, etc., Class: Display, Space RGB, PCS:XYZ, Version: 2.1.0 date, created and size. There is also a Lab Plot. Don't know if that the answer.
There are also additional topics below that Computer - which is where the Displays list lives. Under displays are the Monitor calibration profiles that have been done via the Xrite iOne. There is also a Menu tab at the top of the ColorSync window for Profile First Aid. It verifies the contents of ICC profiles installed on the computer. Errors are reported if any profiles do not conform to the ICC profile specification. When I click "verify" that it says that all is well.
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Roberta,
Here's what most people do:
When saving images for web convert to sRGB and save with the profile embedded. This is standard procedure. How you do this is up to you: you can convert in photoshop, or use something like Lightroom or Save for Web that converts on the fly. If you work in a big working space like proPhotoRGB, you may notice that you loose some of the saturated colors when converting because they have to be squeezed into the smaller sRGB space.
Here's what you can expect:
- 1. Viewing the images in color managed applications (safari, photoshop):
The system should convert between sRGB and the screen profile. Colors should be consistent between systems with some slack for different viewing conditions/white points etc.
- 2. Viewing in non-color managed applications:
Generally apps will send data directly to the screen so wide gamut monitors will look more saturated, screens that are close to sRGB should still look reasonably close. This is also what happens if you don't embed a profile or if the profile is stripped when you upload it to a sharing service like Facebook.
This thread is confusing because your laptop should not be showing more saturated images than you wide gamut NEC when things go wrong. Generally people complain about the opposite issue — untagged images look too saturated on the wide gamut monitor.
I would first test the two systems together in an identical controlled situation. Save an sRGB jpeg with the profile embedded. Having a good test image that you use consistently is helpful—I like the old PhotoDisc image available here: http://www.normankoren.com/printer_calibration.html Don't upload it anywhere. Just open it in safari on both systems directly from disk. If everything is working correctly they should not look very different. If the laptop is still showing hyper-saturated colors, I would suspect there is an issue with the monitor profile. When you look in System Preferences/Displays under the color tab, is the correct profile selected? It should be the profile you made with the i1. Does switching to the default profile help?
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Sigh, if this is correct then I have a problem.
http://www.gballard.net/photoshop/srgb_wide_gamut.html
I've run multiple tests - no matter what, if I embed the color profile then it is overly saturated. I have a Flickr friend who has the same monitor but slightly newer and larger - haven't chatted with her about this in quite a while but she was having the exact same problem. Her solution at that time was to save in sRGB, embed the profile and if it looked overly saturated she would use Picnic or whatever Flickr's photo enhancement is/was called and would desaturate the image a bit from there.
I tried changing the profile by using the built in Mac calibration but see no difference in the images I transferred to the laptop - they are still over saturated.
I couldn't seem to locate the image you suggested that I download - I did find a page where it was mentioned but I couldn't find the download by clicking on any of the links on that page.
Roberta
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Roberta,
Dug some more info up on the fancy monitor:
(http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/monitors/nec-ms-p221w/gr1.png)
Image was in a 7-page review:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/monitors/display/nec-ms-p221w_7.html
Was going to suggest you set the NEC to sRGB emulation mode, until I saw this (no change in the reds!):
(http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/monitors/nec-ms-p221w/gr2.png)
I'd seen that article before - quite informative but a bit confusing for a geezer like me ;-)
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Thanks Ted. I am beginning to think there is no solution for this problem. I don't particularly want to have to purchase another monitor but I may have to do that eventually or not photograph anything with much red. Wonder what happens with the photos I already have in my files that were processed via this monitor if I make a monitor change? It is kind of irritating because originally these monitors were given good reviews for photographic work.
Roberta
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Sigh, if this is correct then I have a problem.
http://www.gballard.net/photoshop/srgb_wide_gamut.html
Roberta, what are you seeing on that page when you mouse over the image? Does it look super-saturated before you mouse over, after you mouse over or both? Is it the same or different on your laptop and desktop.
I'm running a NEW PA241w, which is also wide gamut, along side an Apple Cinema Display. The image on that page behaves the way I expect it to on both monitors. It looks normal and becomes much more saturated when I mouse over.
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... It is kind of irritating because originally these monitors were given good reviews for photographic work.
Roberta the problem does not lie with the monitor.
They happen to be the current industry standard for high-end photographic and video editing work.
I personally feel that you are being misled but I am happy to bow out of this thread.
Tony Jay
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I personally feel that you are being misled but I am happy to bow out of this thread.
Tony Jay
Tony,
Re-reading one of my posts above, it looks I was momentarily confused about the direction of saving images, implying that they were edited on the laptop and sent to the desktop. Embarrassing, that.
Please don't bow out.
Thanks Ted. I am beginning to think there is no solution for this problem. I don't particularly want to have to purchase another monitor but I may have to do that eventually or not photograph anything with much red.
Wonder what happens with the photos I already have in my files that were processed via this monitor if I make a monitor change?
I think that we can all agree that the problem is in the laptop. Your images look good on all our stuff and OK on your non-wide gamut monitor (the Dell?), which implies that your images are OK and that it would be inadvisable to edit them to look good on the laptop which is somehow failing to render images correctly.
What we need is a method for trouble-shooting the laptop. Anybody?
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Mark,
It is the same on both. Where the problem only occurs is when I transfer photos from the desktop with the NEC monitor to the laptop with the ICC profile embedded. If I remove the ICC profile then the photos are not over saturated but may be very slightly desaturated but that could be the difference in screen since everything looks better on the NEC.
Roberta
Roberta, what are you seeing on that page when you mouse over the image? Does it look super-saturated before you mouse over, after you mouse over or both? Is it the same or different on your laptop and desktop.
I'm running a NEW PA241w, which is also wide gamut, along side an Apple Cinema Display. The image on that page behaves the way I expect it to on both monitors. It looks normal and becomes much more saturated when I mouse over.
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Tony,
Please don't back out I understand what you are saying.That was my hope when I purchased the monitor but this seems to be a fairly gnarly problem without an easy fix. The more input the better.
A neighbor down the road has an iMac I think I will try to contact him today to see if I can go to his place to view the photos from his machine. I don't know if he is calibrated but it will give me some idea. I will look at the photos on Flickr and will load the ones from the desktop machine on a thumb drive and see how they look on his machine viewed from preview. He may have gone away for the weekend but will check in a little while to see if he will be around.
Roberta
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Yes, Ted there was some confusion but perhaps it is because I didn't explain it very well. It is easy for confusion to arise in these web conversations.
If there is a way to fix the laptop that would be great. I think as I mentioned earlier if I try viewing my images on our friend's computer that might help me check the problem.
Roberta
Tony,
Re-reading one of my posts above, it looks I was momentarily confused about the direction of saving images, implying that they were edited on the laptop and sent to the desktop. Embarrassing, that.
Please don't bow out.
I think that we can all agree that the problem is in the laptop. Your images look good on all our stuff and OK on your non-wide gamut monitor (the Dell?), which implies that your images are OK and that it would be inadvisable to edit them to look good on the laptop which is somehow failing to render images correctly.
What we need is a method for trouble-shooting the laptop. Anybody?
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It is easy for confusion to arise in these web conversations. If there is a way to fix the laptop that would be great. I think as I mentioned earlier if I try viewing my images on our friend's computer that might help me check the problem.
Here's my understanding: On the desktop computer, images with embedded profiles look good on the NEC and OK on the Dell(?). If that is the case, the following images (with embedded profiles) should all work on the desktop computers' monitors and look the same:
sRGB
(http://kronometric.org/phot/profile/sf.sRGB.jpg)
aRGB
(http://kronometric.org/phot/profile/sf.aRGB.jpg)
ProPhoto
(http://kronometric.org/phot/profile/sf.ProPhoto.jpg)
They should also look OK on your neighbor's Mac. And they do look the same in this post preview on my computer.
Do they all look over-saturated on the laptop, still? Is there any application on the laptop that opens them all correctly?
How about we all stop considering images without embedded profiles, unless for testing purposes?
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Mark,
It is the same on both. Where the problem only occurs is when I transfer photos from the desktop with the NEC monitor to the laptop with the ICC profile embedded. If I remove the ICC profile then the photos are not over saturated but may be very slightly desaturated but that could be the difference in screen since everything looks better on the NEC.
Roberta
Hi Roberta, your answer wasn't really clear—does the image looked the same on both you laptop and desktop or the same when you moused over the image?
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Here's the verdict: Looking at the photos in both Firefox and Safari on both computers at the same time and with the desktop in sRGB emulation - there is a difference on the laptop but perhaps not huge like it would be if the flower was red.
On the desktop-no difference between the three in Firefox but there is a slight difference between Safari and Firefox- the colors are very slightly more saturated in Safari. It is my understanding that Firefox has better color management than Safari but not sure about that - I do see a small difference though.
On the laptop-in Firefox - sRGB is more saturated (but not to the point that I would say OMG it is just more saturated and if I wasn't doing a comparison I might think it was fine). There are some pinks or reds in the background that show more color too. Those pinks/reds are not terribly saturated but that background color does not show up on the desktop with as much strength. The flower listed as aRGB is less saturated than the previous one but more saturated than the final one, ProPhoto. The ProPhoto looks closest to the photos on the desktop. In Safari on the laptop not a huge difference between the two browsers.
I went to my friend's house earlier so I didn't have a chance to see the sunflowers on his computer. On Flickr using his iMac all of the photos I posted with the tomatoes look pretty much the same. (I think the color on his machine may be slightly more saturated than on my desktop and the NEC but the color of the tomatoes look normal just a bit more pop to the color. His iMac has not been calibrated with a device and I believe he said he has not calibrated in a while.) On my laptop viewing the same photos on Flickr, the ones without the embedded profile look less saturated almost normal but a little too desaturated. I also took those same photos on a thumb drive and we opened them in Preview on his desktop. They all look the same. On my laptop opening them in Preview, those with the embedded profile are very over saturated and those without are desaturated - exactly as they appear on Flickr from my laptop.
I wrote my Flickr friend to see whether she was still using her NEC and still having the same problem. She said she is using Vista as her operating system. This is her partial reply:
"Yes, I am still using the NEC monitor but have given up on using the wide gamut option. I use spectraview to calibrate and use the sRGB emulation mode with the white point set at D65. If I save out of photoshop with the save for web option, the colors seem to be fine, or at least I like them. I was using the wide gamut option for a while, and then converting to sRGB for flickr, but decided that it was too much of a hassle. The profile in photoshop is Adobe RGB.
I myself am having lots of trouble with photoshop because I upgraded to CS6 without realizing that it doesn't work well on Vista. One day (soon) I will upgrade the operating system, and hope the problems will go away."
So apparently she is still having a problem as well but has found a work around that satisfies her. I don't particularly want to have to edit in sRGB and go through the steps she is using since I am using Lightroom primarily and by doing that, as has been discussed, I would then be editing to satisfy the laptop, right?
Roberta
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Sorry Mark, let's try again - yes it looks the same on both machines but I suspect that is because I was viewing it in Firefox. As I recall the last time I tried rolling over that image in Safari using the laptop there was a difference - so might that be the better color management in Firefox? I will try to go back and do it again.
Roberta
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Here's the verdict: Looking at [Teds 3 sunflower] photos in both Firefox and Safari on both computers at the same time and with the desktop in sRGB emulation - there is a difference on the laptop but perhaps not huge like it would be if the flower was red.
On the desktop-no difference between the three in Firefox but there is a slight difference between Safari and Firefox- the colors are very slightly more saturated in Safari. It is my understanding that Firefox has better color management than Safari but not sure about that - I do see a small difference though.
Slight differences are OK and can be expected.
It looks like there is nothing wrong with the desktop computer color management - I'm betting that the NEC could have even been left in wide-gamut mode and those three sunflower images would have still looked OK on the NEC.
On the laptop-in Firefox - sRGB is more saturated (but not to the point that I would say OMG it is just more saturated and if I wasn't doing a comparison I might think it was fine). There are some pinks or reds in the background that show more color too. Those pinks/reds are not terribly saturated but that background color does not show up on the desktop with as much strength. The flower listed as aRGB is less saturated than the previous one but more saturated than the final one, ProPhoto. The ProPhoto looks closest to the photos on the desktop. In Safari on the laptop not a huge difference between the two browsers.
So back to the laptop, what is described seems firstly symptomatic of no color-management in that the embedded profiles are being ignored and the laptop is displaying each images' data via some unknown but constant profile. That is why the saturation gets less when viewing in order of sRGB, aRGB, ProPhoto. Secondly, however, of the three, sRGB is the one that should look right with no color-management but an otherwise correct system monitor profile.
My gut feeling is that, if the laptop could be reverted somehow to it's original default profile, all would come right as rain :-)
So apparently she is still having a problem as well but has found a work around that satisfies her. I don't particularly want to have to edit in sRGB and go through the steps she is using since I am using Lightroom primarily and by doing that, as has been discussed, I would then be editing to satisfy the laptop, right?
Right! Is the laptop essential to your work-flow, may I ask?
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Okay, here's where it is right now - I messed about quite a bit with ColorSync. Did a factory reset - bleh! Then messed around a little more. Wound up using a manual calibration where I guessed at the settings using a setting called "Color LCD Calibrated" within System Preferences under the "color" tab within Displays. Now I am close - not exactly like the NEC and probably a bit less vibrancy but no gross red. Your sunflowers match better. I tried using the Xrite iOne a couple of times more but something seems to be going on with that thing or the laptop doesn't like it - dunno what the issue might be. It seems to calibrate okay one time and then makes a mess the next. I probably need to fine tune the calibration a little but for the time being and for present it will certainly do.
My laptop is pretty old (2008) and I've been sort of holding it together with baling twine and duct tape for a while (not literally but that is the way it feels at times.) I've had problems with this laptop from the start and thanks to Apple Care it has had many parts replaced - they even replaced the keyboard and took care of a couple of other issues after it was out of Apple Care because they were the same old problems. It was my posting to the web and downloading from the web work horse though until very recently. I had really poor internet service for years because I live in a rural area and there wasn't much available. Only a week ago I was able to make a change to my service. Previously I often I had to go a coffee shop in town to be able to use my laptop to load my photos, etc. because of the data limits imposed by my internet service. In the past I have seldom used the desktop computer to go online. The laptop is more convenient in many ways because I am not tethered to my desk as with the other one. The thing that was frustrating is that I was uncertain how my photos were actually appearing on the web. I actually thought what I saw on the laptop was what others saw. Bottom line, the laptop is no longer essential. It is due for replacement I am sure but I don't want to do that until I'm forced to do so because of the cost. I feel so much better about the whole thing now though because you and the others here have helped me sort this thing out. Perhaps all of this will prove helpful to someone else as well. I am very grateful for the help I've received.
Tony, if you see this I am going to watch all of those videos. I am certain I can learn a lot.
Regards,
Roberta
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...Tony, if you see this I am going to watch all of those videos. I am certain I can learn a lot.
That's great Roberta. The fidelity of the information cannot be beat even if the style of presentation is not your style. I promise you, you will learn a lot. Tony Jay
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Now I am close - not exactly like the NEC and probably a bit less vibrancy but no gross red. Your sunflowers match better.
Excellent!
My laptop is pretty old (2008) . . . . I had really poor internet service for years because I live in a rural area and there wasn't much available.
I know the feeling, we're miles aways from the nearest fiber-optic phone line. We use Hughes satellite Internet - 100Kb/sec on a good day. My stuff is old too - I run it until it dies or a desirable new app won't run. Still on Windows XP, Elements 6, early Sigma DSLR housebrick cameras. That sunflower was a snapshot taken with a Sigma SD10 in LO res (0.8MP binned pixels) and it is my gamut and profile testing image, so to speak.
Anyhow, well done and glad to have helped.