Saturation loss after uploading

[pegelli]

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@Alberti As far as I know raw files don't have a colour profile, it's just the raw signal strength data from every pixel.

Once you pull it through a raw converter (like Lightroom or other) it creates a jpg (or tif) and then it assigns a colour profile (sRGB/AdobeRGB/profotoRGB/...) so the software that opens it knows how to translate the RGB values (between 0 and 255) to the right colours. I don't think there is a principle difference between colour and monochrome, only that for a monochrome image for every pixel of the photo the R, G and B values are the same.

Once you have a jpg (or tif) file with a certain profile you can use photosop (or other image editing program) to convert the colour profile to another one. For instance if you exported a photo in profotoRGB to have it printed in all its glory on a top quality-wide gamut printer but also want to show it on a web site where they expect every image is sRGB you take the file into photoshop and convert the profoto profile to sRGB and save it with a different name. The photo with the converted profile will look similar to the one with the profotoRGB profile, only colours that fall outside the sRGB space will be "squeezed" into the smaller space and can cause some (slight) differences. If you would just "assign" the sRGB profile any software that opens it will interpret the numbers wrong and therefore show the photo with very wrong and different colours.

Now for the discussion with your dear wife about Leica vs. Fuji colours. Two things:

1.  Is that based on comparing in camera jpg's or raw files processed to taste and then exported? But in both cases it's (in my opinion) not so much caused by the different cameras but by the different camera profiles that are used to create the jpg. If you spend enough time creating and tweaking profiles (and only shoot raw)  I think you can make every camera brand look virtually the same. The question is wether you want to spend the time doing that and how useful it is, because colour perception is also a matter of taste. I've once seen an article on the Luminous Landscape which showed that a colour image that is 100% sectroscopically correct looks very dull and flat to our eyes and to make a pleasing photo you need to tweak the colour balance and saturation to make it something presentable. How much and how you do that is a personal choice and there is basically no right or wrong (or in other words all are spectroscopically wrong, some just further away from 100% correct than others).
2. As sensors improve Dynamic range more contrast needs to be squeezed in the bits of the file, therefore the files will (at the default raw conversion) look flatter and need more work to create a pleasing image. I won't go into the difference between CCD and CMOS sensors (M8 = CCD, 240 = CMOS), many people on the internet have been fighting over those and the effect on the resulting image and it's no use to futher fuel that fire. But given the fact your 240 has more dynamic range than the older M8 means you'll have to work harder to achieve the same result after raw conversion.

Hope this helps a bit, if not let's just keep talking

 

Edited September 12, 2021 by pegelli

[pgk]

15 hours ago, pegelli said:

Unfortunately that didn't cure the problem, all photos (both in the LUF post as well as in the LUF lightbox after clicking on the image in the post) show the colour loss.

Well, that should eliminate any problems before uploading so it looks as though the problem is after upload. There are a few reasons for this that I can think of but since its not something that you can do anything about its up to site admin to check and sort I would say.

RAW file colour spaces are assigned so that they are processed and output into a specific colour space unless all colour management is turned off I think.

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[jaapv]

1 hour ago, pegelli said:

@Alberti As far as I know raw files don't have a colour profile, it's just the raw signal strength data from every pixel.

Once you pull it through a raw converter (like Lightroom or other) it creates a jpg (or tif) and then it assigns a colour profile (sRGB/AdobeRGB/profotoRGB/...) so the software that opens it knows how to translate the RGB values (between 0 and 255) to the right colours. I don't think there is a principle difference between colour and monochrome, only that for a monochrome image for every pixel of the photo the R, G and B values are the same.

Once you have a jpg (or tif) file with a certain profile you can use photosop (or other image editing program) to convert the colour profile to another one. For instance if you exported a photo in profotoRGB to have it printed in all its glory on a top quality-wide gamut printer but also want to show it on a web site where they expect every image is sRGB you take the file into photoshop and convert the profoto profile to sRGB and save it with a different name. The photo with the converted profile will look similar to the one with the profotoRGB profile, only colours that fall outside the sRGB space will be "squeezed" into the smaller space and can cause some (slight) differences. If you would just "assign" the sRGB profile any software that opens it will interpret the numbers wrong and therefore show the photo with very wrong and different colours.

Now for the discussion with your dear wife about Leica vs. Fuji colours. Two things:

1.  Is that based on comparing in camera jpg's or raw files processed to taste and then exported? But in both cases it's (in my opinion) not so much caused by the different cameras but by the different camera profiles that are used to create the jpg. If you spend enough time creating and tweaking profiles (and only shoot raw)  I think you can make every camera brand look virtually the same. The question is wether you want to spend the time doing that and how useful it is, because colour perception is also a matter of taste. I've once seen an article on the Luminous Landscape which showed that a colour image that is 100% sectroscopically correct looks very dull and flat to our eyes and to make a pleasing photo you need to tweak the colour balance and saturation to make it something presentable. How much and how you do that is a personal choice and there is basically no right or wrong (or in other words all are spectroscopically wrong, some just further away from 100% correct than others).
2. As sensors improve Dynamic range more contrast needs to be squeezed in the bits of the file, therefore the files will (at the default raw conversion) look flatter and need more work to create a pleasing image. I won't go into the difference between CCD and CMOS sensors (M8 = CCD, 240 = CMOS), many people on the internet have been fighting over those and the effect on the resulting image and it's no use to futher fuel that fire. But given the fact your 240 has more dynamic range than the older M8 means you'll have to work harder to achieve the same result after raw conversion.

Hope this helps a bit, if not let's just keep talking

 

You forget to mention: 
Once you have compressed the larger colour space. into a smaller one (e.g Adobe RGB to sRGB) you cannot restore it to the larger colour gamut. Assigning a colour space is only done when you are dealing with a mismatch.

You can avoid all these problems by working in LAB. It is the only colour space that you can convert into and back again. But it requires a steep learning curve and can be quite impractical.

A monochrome image has no colour information, so Photoshop will open it in greyscale by default. You can translate to RGB but the R, G and B values will always be identical for any pixel, unless you ske the values for toning. The point is that RGB combines luminosity with colour values.

[pegelli]

17 minutes ago, jaapv said:

You forget to mention: 
Once you have compressed the larger colour space. into a smaller one (e.g Adobe RGB to sRGB) you cannot restore it to the larger colour gamut. Assigning a colour space is only done when you are dealing with a mismatch.

Good addition Jaap, it's absolutely true, once compressed into a smaller space you can't decompress in the wider space. You could still convert to the larger space but nothing will change unless you start playing again with satutration and other colour shifts, but restoring to how it was is impossible.

[pegelli]

26 minutes ago, pgk said:

RAW file colour spaces are assigned so that they are processed and output into a specific colour space unless all colour management is turned off I think.

That might indeed be the case for some raw converters, but for instance in Lightroom that doesn't show any difference to the raw file wether I set my camera to sRGB or Adobe RGB. Raw files are identical and can still be exported to any other colour space of choice in the export dialog. The only difference I have found is for in-camera jpg's which get assigned this colour space.

[jaapv]

Lightroom works natively (in the background) in Prophoto, shows sRGB previews and exports in the specified colour space. Photoshop will show the colour space user-defined by ACR but will use LAB for the background engine. It is up to the user to dumb down in the end.

[pegelli]

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23 minutes ago, jaapv said:

Lightroom works natively (in the background) in Prophoto, shows sRGB previews and exports in the specified colour space.

Are you sure? I think the previews are always in the wide gamut (wether you call it profotoRGB or MelissaRGB doesn't really matter for this discussion) and the preview will only show in a different (smaller) colour space when you select "soft proofing", where you can specify any colour space that resides on your computer, including sRGB, AdobeRGB and printer/paper colour spaces.

Edited September 12, 2021 by pegelli

[jaapv]

I am not 100% sure about the previews. I read it in an article that I don’t trust completely. It may have referred to soft proofing. Anyway, you are looking for trouble if you edit in wide gamut on a sRGB monitor.Profoto or  similar on an Adobe RGB or DCI-P3 monitor will still be OK as is Adobe RGB on an sRGB monitor ( but don’t try that printing or on a web JPG) but I would not advise a bigger jump. 

[jaapv]

Coming back to the OP, as long as we have no idea of the colour management of a site nor of the browser results may be unexpected  As for LUF, I run a fully colour managed workflow on a calibrated Adobe RGB monitor go to. sRGB for posting and the results closely match the ones I see in Chrome on LUF  I have no idea what Flickr does as I don’ use it  

 

[pegelli]

1 hour ago, jaapv said:

Coming back to the OP, as long as we have no idea of the colour management of a site nor of the browser results may be unexpected  As for LUF, I run a fully colour managed workflow on a calibrated Adobe RGB monitor go to. sRGB for posting and the results closely match the ones I see in Chrome on LUF  I have no idea what Flickr does as I don’ use it  

 

I also don't use Flickr but Smugmug.

All my uploads to Smugmug look exactly the same as in Photshop in my "latest/updated" firefox which is colour space aware All files are sRGB and so is my user defined default working colour space in photoshop. My monitor is wide gamut and calibrated (GretagMcbeth I1). I wouldn't call it a fully colour managed workflow but it's pretty close.

So my question back to you would be:

1. Do you see the colour loss in the latest examples I posted?
2. How do you explain that the "lightbox" view of my photo in AdobeRGB directly uploaded to LUF shows correct, while in the forum post it's as dull as the sRGB (LUF post & lightbox) which is directly uploaded to LUF

I'm willing to keep trying if the problem is somewhere on my side even though current suspicion is that it's a LUF problem somewhere in the upload routine. Albert also said he got a very close colour match when I first reported the problem but now he's seeing the same as I do. You really need to look for it to see it.

Until the issue is resolved one way or another I will keep linking my photo's from SmugMug and not use the LUF direct upload, then at least I see them on the forum exactly the way I intended them to look. My next test is going to be from a different computer and using Chrome, let's see what that gives

 

Edited September 12, 2021 by pegelli

[pegelli]

So, here's the next test, trying to replicate jaapv's workflow with Google Chrome on a different computer. Only copied the raw over, processed it in Lightroom (same settings as other example manually adjusted by slider), exported as sRGB, added text in photoshop and confirmed it was sRGB

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And here is the linked SmugMug version for reference

Edit: It seems I have to eat my words, this looks splendid without colour loss. So it doesn't seem to be a LUF problem but something with my set-up.

Next test is to install Chrome on my other computer and repeat to see if its something firefox does when uploading the files to LUF or that there's something else wrong with my Lightroom or photoshop on the other computer.

To be continued

 

Edited September 12, 2021 by pegelli

[pegelli]

OK, via Chrome from my computer that gave the colour loss problem when using firefox:

Direct upload to LUF

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

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For reference the SmugMug version

Again a splendid result without colour loss!

So now I have to figure out what my firefox is doing wrong when I direct upload a file to LUF

Thanks everybody for responding to my problem, the collective discussion helped me to pinpoint the problem and I learned some other things about colour management settings as well along the way!

[jaapv]

https://boutiqueretouching.com/browser-color/

[pegelli]

10 minutes ago, jaapv said:

https://boutiqueretouching.com/browser-color/

Thanks Jaap, my Firefox settings are exactly as indicated in this article for optimum browser color management. And as far as I know it's only when I upload to LUF I get this problem, all other sites I have not experienced this problem. And it also doesn't seem to be a generic Firefox problem. I tested my other computer and uploaded to LUF with Firefox and voilá, again no problem with colour loss. So it's something specific to the Firefox set-up on this specific computer that's giving me the problem.

I guess I'll start using Chrome as my browser for LUF until I have figured out what's causing that problem.

[Anbaric]

1 hour ago, pegelli said:

OK, via Chrome from my computer that gave the colour loss problem when using firefox:

Direct upload to LUF

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

For reference the SmugMug version

Again a splendid result without colour loss!

So now I have to figure out what my firefox is doing wrong when I direct upload a file to LUF

Thanks everybody for responding to my problem, the collective discussion helped me to pinpoint the problem and I learned some other things about colour management settings as well along the way!

Only your image labelled 'sRGB' has an embedded RGB profile, for whatever reason. Neither the 'Exported from lightroom as sRGB' nor the 'Different Computer Ground up processed raw file' do. How these are treated in different browsers and other programs depend on whether they have colour management available (and enabled) and what the settings are. One way to see whether an image has an appropriate profile is to enable 'Ask When Opening' for 'Profile Mismatches' and 'Missing Profiles' in Photoshop's 'Edit->Color Settings'. Then try opening the image in PS, checking any uploaded version by re-downloading it to see if the upload process has somehow stripped the profile. Images for web use should be converted (not assigned) to sRGB if they are in some other colour space. If you keep the sRGB profile embedded too, software that knows what to do with it should display the image as intended, whereas  programs that lack colour management should still display it reasonably well. But this isn't always under your control. Some websites do strip profiles or attempt to convert to sRGB etc.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Anbaric

[pegelli]

Thanks @Anbaric, I checked and all the files have the sRGB profile embedded when uploading,

When downloading there is a difference. When I download directly from the LUF post I get a smaller size file (1092 x 728 pixels) and no embedded profile. But when I click on the image and then click again on it in the lightbox view the image opens in a separate tab and when I download that one it is again the full size I uploaded (1800 x 1200 pixels) and has the sRGB profile embedded. I also note the exif is stripped from the image in the LUF post, while it is still there (including the reference to the sRGB profile) in the image opened on the separate tab.

So my conclusion is that the photo shown in the post is actually a different file (it also has a different file name on the LUF server, the letters "thumb" have been added in the name). So that means that the sRGB profile and exif data are maintained when uploading to LUF but that this information is stripped when they internally create the smaller file to show in the post. However since I do everything in sRGB and my browser assumes sRGB when no profile is in the file it still all shows the same.

 

And btw, the reason you see everything fine on the photo labelled "sRGB" is because that one is not uploaded to LUF but linked from SmugMug which preserves colour profiles and exif data for all sizes that are shown.

 

And btw 2, this doesn't explain the colour loss and "grey veil" when I upload via firefox from this computer, Using Chrome on this computer or firefox on another one everything is fine so there's something wrong with my system setup as well.

Edited September 12, 2021 by pegelli

[Anbaric]

1 hour ago, pegelli said:

Thanks @Anbaric, I checked and all the files have the sRGB profile embedded when uploading,

When downloading there is a difference. When I download directly from the LUF post I get a smaller size file (1092 x 728 pixels) and no embedded profile. But when I click on the image and then click again on it in the lightbox view the image opens in a separate tab and when I download that one it is again the full size I uploaded (1800 x 1200 pixels) and has the sRGB profile embedded. I also note the exif is stripped from the image in the LUF post, while it is still there (including the reference to the sRGB profile) in the image opened on the separate tab.

So my conclusion is that the photo shown in the post is actually a different file (it also has a different file name on the LUF server, the letters "thumb" have been added in the name). So that means that the sRGB profile and exif data are maintained when uploading to LUF but that this information is stripped when they internally create the smaller file to show in the post. However since I do everything in sRGB and my browser assumes sRGB when no profile is in the file it still all shows the same.

 

And btw, the reason you see everything fine on the photo labelled "sRGB" is because that one is not uploaded to LUF but linked from SmugMug which preserves colour profiles and exif data for all sizes that are shown.

 

And btw 2, this doesn't explain the colour loss and "grey veil" when I upload via firefox from this computer, Using Chrome on this computer or firefox on another one everything is fine so there's something wrong with my system setup as well.

That sounds right. If I click through to the locally hosted images, I also see the profiles are intact in the larger versions. Where are you still seeing desaturation? The first two images you posted in this thread are missing their profiles even in 'lightbox' mode, and the first one looks like what I'd expect for an Adobe RGB image that has lost its profile and is being incorrectly interpreted as sRGB. If in the PS 'missing profile' dialog box I set 'Assign profile' to Adobe RGB (because in this case PS needs to know what colour space to convert from) and also check the 'and then convert document to working RGB' box (my working profile is currently sRGB), it comes out about right, though not as saturated as the second image. Perhaps my profiles aren't quite the same as yours. I'd suggest checking every version before and after import and export from the programs you use, and before and after upload.

[Alberti]

I installed the recommended settings in Firefox that Jaap recommended (Stabndard browser for me is  Safari) so let me see if it matters a lot. Source: a file that has been exported from LR as sRGB (1000*1500). (Elmar 24 on M240, known to be very colour correct)

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As viewed post posting in Lightbox:

1. the colour of the sRGB preview is similar as posted
2. the colour of the lightbox sRGB is similar as posted

And now the same  file in adobeRGB, like I use to do in the Safari world

As viewed in Lightbox:

• The latter now has a fully saturated dress in the lightbox. No details any more. Like Pegelli's boat, this picture with the red content is a great reference.

So that settles it for me - to use FF for LUF

Thanks Jaap.

Edited September 12, 2021 by Alberti

[Anbaric]

20 minutes ago, Alberti said:

I installed the recommended settings in Firefox that Jaap recommended (Stabndard browser for me is  Safari) so let me see if it matters a lot. Source: a file that has been exported from LR as sRGB (1000*1500). (Elmar 24 on M240, known to be very colour correct)

Welcome, dear visitor! As registered member you'd see an image here…

Simply register for free here – We are always happy to welcome new members!

As viewed post posting in Lightbox:

1. the colour of the sRGB preview is similar as posted
2. the colour of the lightbox sRGB is similar as posted

And now the same  file in adobeRGB, like I use to do in the Safari world

As viewed in Lightbox:

• The latter now has a fully saturated dress in the lightbox. No details any more. Like Pegelli's boat, this picture with the red content is a great reference.

So that settles it for me - to use FF for LUF

Thanks Jaap.

Is fully saturated what you intended, or the less saturated look with more detail? I've tried downloading both lightbox images (right-click -> 'Save Link As' in Firefox) and both thumbnail images (right-click-> 'Save Image As'). The lightbox images have embedded profiles, sRGB in the first, Adobe RGB in the second. The Thumbnails have had their profiles stripped. Loading all of them into a colour-managed application like PS, only the lightbox Adobe RGB image stands out as saturated. The sRGB lightbox image and both thumbnail images all look less saturated.

But I'd expect the sRGB and Adobe RGB lightbox images to look much more similar to each other in a colour-managed application, suggesting that one of the images has been assigned to the other colour space rather than converted to it, so it doesn't look correct. Conversion is usually what you want, unless an image has a missing profile and you know what it should be. And if you convert to sRGB, images should look OK in all browsers, even if the upload or the thumbail generator strips the profile or the browser isn't colour managed.

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[pegelli]

@Alberti I concur with Anbaric's conclusion. In the post both images look virtually identical but when you look in the lightbox (after clicking) I see the AdobeRGB image as more saturated and also a bit lighter (especially the middle reds and middle greens).