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Author Topic: Color Saturation Problem  (Read 3459 times)

Michael Erlewine

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Color Saturation Problem
« on: March 18, 2011, 04:19:45 am »

I am having a color-saturation problem. I am on Windows 7, with monitor calibration working fine.

When I look at an image either in Lightroom 3 or Photoshop CS5, I see over saturation.Yet, when I export it to a Tiff or JPG file and look at that file I see no over-saturation.

To show you the problem I screen-grabbed an over-saturated image in Lightroom and placed it in PS. Lightroom is ProPhoto RGB and PS-CS5 is sRGB…so ignore any of those differences for now.

The first image clearly shows the over saturation of the flower in the lower right-hand corner.

The second image photo is the same image exported from Lightroomto a JPG. The over saturation does not appear.

Does anyone know what the problem is please?
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bjanes

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Re: Color Saturation Problem
« Reply #1 on: March 18, 2011, 12:09:11 pm »

I am having a color-saturation problem. I am on Windows 7, with monitor calibration working fine.

When I look at an image either in Lightroom 3 or Photoshop CS5, I see over saturation.Yet, when I export it to a Tiff or JPG file and look at that file I see no over-saturation.

To show you the problem I screen-grabbed an over-saturated image in Lightroom and placed it in PS. Lightroom is ProPhoto RGB and PS-CS5 is sRGB…so ignore any of those differences for now.

The first image clearly shows the over saturation of the flower in the lower right-hand corner.

The second image photo is the same image exported from Lightroomto a JPG. The over saturation does not appear.

Does anyone know what the problem is please?

The problem with your posted images is that they have no attached profile, and what Photoshop does to display the colors depends on your color preference settings. If you have two copies of the same image, one in sRGB and the other in ProPhotoRGB, they will look the same in Photoshop, provided that there is no gamut clipping in the output spaces or the monitor. This may sound counter-intuitive, but whole purpose of color management is to preserve the appearance of the image.

If you do a screen capture if an image in Photoshop, the actual data numbers sent to the screen will be captured, but their meaning will be ambiguous. I think the proper way to give numbers meaning would be to assign your monitor profile and then convert to a standard output space such as sRGB.

The internal working space of Lightroom is Mellisa (ProPhoto primaries with an sRBG tone curve). When you look at the image on screen, the Mellisa numbers will be converted to the space of your monitor for display. When you export to a file with a standard color space, the color numbers will be converted to that space. To what space did you export?

Regards,

Bill



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Michael Erlewine

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Re: Color Saturation Problem
« Reply #2 on: March 18, 2011, 12:27:33 pm »

Here is my procedure. I combine two or more files that are TIFF in a 3rd-party piece of software. Probably somewhere the EXIF data is lost. When I export files as TIFF that are internally in Lightroom .NEF and Prophoto RGB, how do I force the exported TIFF to carry the EXIF data? Then I import the resulting TIFF and it probably has no profile assigned.

Any ideas. Sorry to be ignorant in these details.

And thanks!
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