Colour Profile Headaches

[greedy123]

Has anyone else ever been thrown by the colour profile implications on your photos?

I work on calibrated monitors in lightroom and occasionally in photoshop, and I put my images onto deviantart. I this week went through all my deviant art submissions to tidy them up/update watermarks and I noticed that the thumbnail images were being created darker than the actual images uploaded.

I contacted devart and they said:

It appears you have a colour profile embedded in the image. Unfortunately colour profiles cannot be added to thumbnail images so it appears less saturated that the full resolution images. At this time there isn't anything we can do about this unless you remove the colour profile from the image.

By playing around in photoshop I worked out the thumbnails are showing the images in Adobe RGB (1998) where as my images had been exporting in ProPhoto RGB. I never had this problem in the past so after investigation I found that my export setting on lightroom had been set to prophoto (probably by accident during a scroll) instead of adobe 1998. This has been set back to Adobe 1998 now and all seems well in the hood.

On the plus side, a couple of the thumbnails looked pretty awesome contrast wise with the incorrect profile assigned so I have since fiddled with the profiles in photoshop to improve them. I'd tried to match the colours by editing the settings in lightroom but I couldn't do it manually and didn't know if it was possible to convert profiles in the application. At least something good came out and I learnt a bit about profiles though I'm still perplexed by them sometimes.

Has anyone else had any issues with profiles? What spaces do people work in generally?

 

[Rojin]

I have the camera set to Adobe RGB and I leave the profile as this if sending for printing. Anything for uploading to the web gets converted to sRGB. I haven't had any issues, that I have noticed anyway!

 

[Messiah Khan]

The trick with colour spaces is to end up in a colour space with a gamut the same or slightly smaller than that of the output device/material. The gamut of space and devices goes roughly like this, from really wide to narrow;

ProPhoto
Printers
Wide Gamut Monitors
AdobeRGB
Most monitors
sRGB

As you can see, Prophoto has a really wide gamut (ie, it has a wide range of colours. Note the amount of colours are the same as this comes from the bit depth of an image. The colours are just spaced further apart.) which makes it good for editing as long as you work in colour managed software such as Photoshop or Lightroom. In colour managed software the the wide colour gamut is remapped to that of the output device (ie your calibrated monitor).

As soon as you go out of colour managed software, you end up getting gamut clipping as the output device is unable to display the full gamut of the colour space. This results in washed out images unlike you intended. If I am not being too confusing, you may now see that the gamut of AdobeRGB is beyond that of most monitors. This again results in gamut clipping when viewed on the internet (except in Safari, which is actually colour managed. I don't think other browsers are unless they have recently changed).

So as a rule of thumb, like Rojin mentioned; If you are editing for output to a monitor (ie, the internet) then make sure you output as sRGB. If you however are editing for print, then AdobeRGB is generally a better choice as you re using up more of the potential colour range without going too far and clipping the gamut.

One thing to note is that you can edit in one colour space but be able to preview the output in another colour space by using something called softproofing. In Photoshop, go to view>sofproofing>custom( I think that's where it is from memory) This now simulates the output of another colour space/profile. So you can softproof a paper profile, or you could softproof a narrower gamut colour space. Hope that clears it up a bit.

 

[glitch]

I have the camera set to Adobe RGB and I leave the profile as this if sending for printing. Anything for uploading to the web gets converted to sRGB. I haven't had any issues, that I have noticed anyway!

You shoot exclusively in JPEG then?

 

[greedy123]

Yup, certainly helped
I kinda knew that from what I've read over the years, its just nice to see it confirmed lol.

Do you manually convert to sRGB in photoshop or just select it in export from lightroom for uploading to the web?

Am I right in thinking there is no point working in prophoto if the camera uses AdobeRGB?

 

[ElDude]

This results in washed out images unlike you intended.

This explains why, after I installed Lightroom 3.3 my test photo with my new lens was washed out. It was set to srgb before hand, but I hadn't noticed the update reset it to prophoto.

Strangely though, for a reason I can't quite find the answer to, the windows picture viewer thing in Windows 7, suddenly displays everything EXTREMELY dark. I have no idea what it's using as a profile, but everything went odd after the lightroom update. I didn't change anything else. I dunno what's going on there

Oh and thankyou to MK for mentioning softproofing. Amazingly after using various versions of Photoshop for years I've never even noticed that

 

[glitch]

Am I right in thinking there is no point working in prophoto if the camera uses AdobeRGB?

There's no point selecting the colour space at all if you're shooting in RAW. The camera takes no notice of it whatsoever and the RAW file has the camera's own colour space embedded in it.

And should you then find yourself processing your RAW files in Lightroom, you'll be using a close approximation of ProPhoto anyway as that's what LR uses as it's default colour space. Well, it's the ProPhoto space with an sRGB tone curve.

 

[ElDude]

There's no point selecting the colour space at all if you're shooting in RAW. The camera takes no notice of it whatsoever and the RAW file has the camera's own colour space embedded in it.

And should you then find yourself processing your RAW files in Lightroom, you'll be using a close approximation of ProPhoto anyway as that's what LR uses as it's default colour space. Well, it's the ProPhoto space with an sRGB tone curve.

With that in mind, what would be the best way to process RAW? Pull into Photoshop CS/Elements then apply choice processing in Lightroom?

 

[glitch]

With that in mind, what would be the best way to process RAW? Pull into Photoshop CS/Elements then apply choice processing in Lightroom?

It's horses for courses really, but for a few years now I've been an advocate of processing RAW files in Lightroom, exporting as 16-bit ProPhoto TIFFs and then importing those into Photoshop for final editing/soft-proofing/colour profiling/sharpening before export.

However, all of that is a moot point if you don't have a colour-calibrated workflow, don't soft-proof and you're not entirely sure where your images are going to end up being seen - the latter being a very important point.

And it's probably also worth pointing out that compared to most photographers I'm dealing with a comparatively small amount of images, so I am afforded the luxury of time to spend on my workflow.

 

[ElDude]

Well my profile issue only cropped up when taking a RAW photo to see exactly what my new lens was doing with no processing at all applied. It was only when I uploaded it to Flickr that I noticed the profile issue. If I'm just sticking to the web I suppose setting it to srgb in Lightroom for export, or using the web setting in export would make sure it's seen how I want it. I've found the noise reduction and sharpening in Lightroom to be better than Photoshop. Well, basic sharpening anyway.

I've never sent anything off for printing as the only ones I've framed, I've used my old R800 printer for your standard sized prints, so no profile errors have cropped up yet. I VERY rarely print photos.

 

[Rojin]

You shoot exclusively in JPEG then?

Actually on the 7D not really, on the 1D3 I would shoot sport in JPEG as they were so good out of the camera. I had it setup quite nicely, I haven't really bothered on the 7D though.