WOW windows picture viewer is rubish

vapor matt

vapor matt

vapor matt

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For ages ive used windows built in picture and fax viewer to view my pictures, even installing the Raw codec so i dont have to open them useing CS4 ect.

I have used CS3 CS4 to process ect but viewed in windows even installing the raw codec to do so. Today i thought i would have a look useing somthing else after my brother said he use's nero to view his pics from his cannon D7 ect as they always look better than windows built in viewer.

I had no idea that the windows one was so bad! Iam viewing on a 24" screen which is fantastic, yet the pictures in windows lacked sharpness, and looked soft. I then thought mmm lets see what Nikon view NX looks like!

Well the diffrence is amazing! View NX just looks twice as sharp as the windows built in picture viewer, in both Jpeg and RAW. Why is the windows one so poor or is it based on the basis that poor pictures look better softer so it has some kind of filter built in making pictures look soft and blured.

anyone else noticed this? its like i just got me some new eyes!
 
Also beware of rotating JPEGs (not sure about other extensions) in Windows viewer, it is not lossless!
 
It depends on how the program scales the pictures. At 100% they should look the same on any program.

At anything other than 100%, it's down to what sort of resampling/interpolation the program uses.
 
windows picture and fax viewer isnt a patch on View NX at any view size, be it 100% or 33% ect. its like it has some kind of filter to make things look soft and blured.

I didnt belive it myself untill i tried it. amazing diffrence.
 
The default windows picture viewer on Vista is rubbish, the colours it reproduces are really bad. I spent a good half a day wondering why the pictures Ive been editing in photoshop looks nothing like what it should look like when viewed with the picture viewer. I then tried opening the images up on my web browser and the picture looks fine, very fustrating as I thought it was a colour management problem.
 
The default windows picture viewer on Vista is rubbish, the colours it reproduces are really bad. I spent a good half a day wondering why the pictures Ive been editing in photoshop looks nothing like what it should look like when viewed with the picture viewer. I then tried opening the images up on my web browser and the picture looks fine, very fustrating as I thought it was a colour management problem.
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I couldnt belive it when my brother said, and your right, the colours look much better now, not so washed out as windows viewer.
 
Scottland said:
Other than Picasa, are there any other good picture viewers that open really quickly and have thumbnail browsing etc?
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I use Windows Photo Viewer for quick viewing and Adobe Bridge for my photography library.

I've had none of the problems described above with Windows Photo Viewer.
 
It is useful for something, i use it to check what pictures will look like in explorer or firefox, because they both dont support a full adobe 1998 gamut as far as im aware.
 
someone posted a thread similar to this one a few weeks back, the title was something like "windows picture view is 16 bit" or something long those lines iirc.

i always noticed the images were very poor quality so read it and someone mentioned a fix to change the colour palette. after doing the fix my images are much better, but i cant remember how to sort it :D so you will have to look through the threads yourself :D


found it:

Alex53 said:
Nevermind, sorted it, had to do with the default colour management profile in windows. Was set to the monitor's. I set it to sRGB and all is ok now :)_
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might be worth a try?? :)
 
I had a similar experience with this too, I had taken a few pics of family over xmas and new year and decided to have a flick through them,
but I had recently installed Nero 9 and as it had set itself as the defaults for viewing videos and pictures etc.
So when I opened up a picture on the SD card, it used Nero Photo Snap,
So I closed it and opened it again with picture viewer and I imediately noticed the difference.
Now I'm no expert but when I compared the two side by side I could see the colour differences and as I was going to give them a tweak in the Canon editing software it could have led me to make unnecessary changes.
 
Yup, Panic has hit the button (sorry about that), the default colour profile for windows picture viewer is dreadful, set it to the standard sRGB profile and it should improve tenfold.

This problem also manifests itself in Adobe products as images being skewed towards the red spectrum, setting the proof profile from the default to sRGB will correct it.
 
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