Colour Management and Lightroom

[Jonathan Ang]

Well sometime back I was asking how come my facebook photos look darker after exporting...well the issue it back to haunt me. Anyhow I realised something:

I asked my friend and he compared the facebook photos with the ones in flickr and he said the FB one is slightly darker. . . fair enough.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31221849@N06/5164190020/in/photostream/ vs
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=460577783195&set=a.450283248195.245805.672308195 (i think privacy is set to friend only)



Okay, maybe a facebook issue. Next,

my LR screen looks brighter than either of these. strangely enough I think the exported jpeg from LR already looks "darker". So the issue I think is that LR >> LR export already can tell the difference. Im not sure if it has anything to do with shooting in adobe rgb and exporting in sRGB? I've done some research on google and it seems I'm not the only one.

Now back to colour management: My monitor is not calibrated (no $$), so I am not colour managed properly. I just tried http://www.calibrize.com/ last night as it showed up in the midst of my research on the LR export issue. My screen now is slightly dimmer than before after doing the suggested tweaks.

My question now is...if anyone is kind enough to tell me. Are my pictures generally suffering from a slight underexposure? If so maybe I can have more leeway to bump brightness or pull the midtone/highlights a little higher? Ideally of course I would get a calibrated monitor, but now a little tight and I don't have any friends with any hardware calibration devices...

btw the pictures linked are supposed to be a little more high key than what I'm looking at now after "calibration". not sure how it looks on you guys' side.

 

[Octarine]

What browser / image viewer are you using? Do note that not all of them are colour profile aware. So your export from LR is likely to be fine (in terms of embedded profile) but the viewer might not consider this and render whatever it likes.
Also: Facebook and other websites resize your image, removing all profile information. Then it's back to guessing for the browser anyway.

 

[Jonathan Ang]

What browser / image viewer are you using? Do note that not all of them are colour profile aware. So your export from LR is likely to be fine (in terms of embedded profile) but the viewer might not consider this and render whatever it likes.
Also: Facebook and other websites resize your image, removing all profile information. Then it's back to guessing for the browser anyway.

I see. Well I'm using google chrome and firefox, I tried both side by sides to compare. The viewer is the default windows preview window.

I suspect the the culprit is mainly due to the adobe rgb>srgb conversion...probably. . . hmm. Shall test exporting as adobe rgb instead.

 

[Octarine]

I see. Well I'm using google chrome and firefox, I tried both side by sides to compare. The viewer is the default windows preview window.

Firefox is able to pick up the embedded profile. Not sure about Chrome, but it should do the same. Do your own testing here: http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html#
The Windows preview window is .. well, just a preview. No colour management at all, not even the image viewer knows about ICC profiles.

I suspect the the culprit is mainly due to the adobe rgb>srgb conversion...probably. . . hmm. Shall test exporting as adobe rgb instead.

No, the final output must be RGB. That means, even if FB or flickr strip off the embedded profile the colous will not differ much. With Adobe RGB or anything else than normal RGB the chances are high that the colours will be off completely.