Image colour and brightness changes after uploading to printer.

I just ordered a bunch of holiday images printed - nothing special, just std 6X4s to go in an album - and as requested by the printer, zipped the files before uploading. The prints have all come back dark, and with what appears to be reduced yellows. The printer has all the images in a user gallery on their website, and comparing between the original jpegs viewed in the browser and the images on their site I can see the same difference. The original images were all created in the sRGB colour space.

Any ideas why this might happen? The effect appears a little variable, with the darkest images almost black. I've used these people before & they've been fine.

Depends on what you used but the likes of WinZip doesn't use lossy compression.

The algorithm built into W8 to make a compressed folder.

Printer has just emailed asking me to call, so we'll see what he says.

So we had a discussion, very friendly & polite, about calibration of both printers and monitors, about a human checking images individually and about how stuff was processed (as one would reasonably expect, it goes straight from upload through printers for budget 6X4s, as these were. Entirely reasonable.

The hiccup I have is that there is *something* about their website's image processing software that is changing the way my jpegs are rendered compared to how they are on my machine. As a trial I uploaded the same images (uncompressed) and then reviewed the uploaded image. All jpegs were changed, with reduced yellow and made darker. I then compared a TIF file that I used for a canvas a few weeks back, and the images look just the same on the site & from computer. Finally I uploaded a jpeg straight out of my wife's panasonic camera, and that also did not seem to have been changed.

It therefore seems to me that jpegs (strictly .jpg files) produced by Lightroom display and print differently between our systems, while other file types or un-modified jpegs display & print effectively the same.

Any ideas.

Out of interest are you exporting from the develop module or the print module?

Library. I had a quick look & couldn't see a bulk export function in the print module (I'm exporting >160 images).

I assume you are using the sRGB option in the Export function.

If you export a single image ( just for ease ) and open it in Photoshop or similar does it show that the profile is sRGB. I've exported thousands of image from Lightroom with the sRGB profile with no problem at all, so I can't understand why you should be having this problem.

Can your printers system handle Adobe RGB. If so try uploading an image in that colour space. If that is fine, something seems to have corrupted the sRGB option.

Again take the file into Photoshop and convert it to sRGB and see if that makes a difference to the upload. Should you now find that this gives the result you need it would seem the sRGB colour space you have on tour computer may be corrupted. You may be able to select another one. When you export you'll see the dialogue box which enables you to select the output colour space. At the bottom of the three options is "Other". Choose this and you'll get a whole option of output profiles to use. See if you have some additional options for sRGB. If you don't see any tick the "Display profiles" tick box. Hopefully you should then get some additional sRGB profiles. Try selecting one that is not in the Adobe directory, and see if this makes any difference.

The image appears to be in sRGB - it is listed in the exif data. I don't have photoshop, but opening in perfect photosuite 8 presents the image as I see it in Lightroom: I see no difference between jpegs in sRGB, ProPhoto RBG or a TIF in sRGB.

I have previously had successful prints using sRGB with this print shop, and imaged uploaded using AdobeRGB 1998 colourspace look 'better' on their website that sRGB. The solution may be just to re-process the images, saving an AdobeRBG and compensating slightly with brightness and colour balance.

Thanks for taking the time to help.

Now here's a curious thing. I use an application called Irfanview to quickly view images, and it appears to display images output from Lightroom (whether .jpg or .tif) with exactly the same colour balance and brightness as the printers web site, and DIFFERENT from Firefox and Lightroom. However if I import an image into GIMP, then export it in the same format, that image looks similar in all applications.

There is something about Lightroom output that is interpreted differently in different applications.

Problem solved - I had set the colour space for external editing to Pro Photo RGB, and even though I was exporting as sRGB, the Pro Photo RGB was being included. Resetting these to sRGB fixed the problem.