The Flickr Effect Revisited

ed_o_brain

ed_o_brain

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I'm just curious as to whether anyone else has noticed a change in how pictures uploaded to that famous photo sharing website are processed when they are uploaded?

Recently I uploaded a photo to flickr, a composite set of portrait photos. The first think I noticed, after upload, was how the skin tones were slightly desaturated and a good stop or two darker.

I've noticed previously there's some sharpening that goes on, but never had I noticed any difference before in the actual rendition of tones.

Of the images below, the first is the flickr image and the second is the original as uploaded to my website:


The Team @Ferrious Ltd by ed_o_brain, on Flickr

p375878043-4.jpg


What do you think? Do you think Flickr is trying to do something with the white balance?
 
The Flickr image is tagged with ProPhotoRGB

The one on your web site is sRGB.

e2a: With a calibrated system, they should look very similar (and they do) but they may be slightly different because they're different colour spaces. On my screen, the woman's arm in the bottom frame looks slightly greener on the Flickr image and slightly more orange in your own web host.
 
Last edited:
Thanks Rob, that's interesting.

Both original images are ProPhotoRGB ... so the upload to my site would be converting them to sRGB.

However, I can clearly see a difference between the original ProPhotoRGB file on my PC and the ProPhotoRGB file on flickr.

I think the issue is web browsers ignoring the embedded colour profile, which is why it's not appearing correctly on Flickr. The implicit sRGB conversion which has occurred on my website has resolved this issue.

So I guess the moral of this story is convert images optimised for web use to sRGB.

Thanks
 
of course, I was being slightly daft using Google Chrome to look at the image, which doesn't handle colour profiles quite right (at least on the Mac).

Check it in Safari and they're almost impossible to tell apart, though the difference was small in Chrome.


ed_o_brain said:
The implicit sRGB conversion which has occurred on my website has resolved this issue.

So I guess the moral of this story is convert images optimised for web use to sRGB.

Thanks
Click to expand...

Yep. I can't say it often enough. Always, always, always upload sRGB for the web, unless you have complete control of the whole chain all the way through from your upload to the computer on which the image is being viewed. There's enough browsers and computers out there that don't handle colour properly to make it a no-brainer.
 
Internet explorer will display all images in sRGB (***** RGB as I like to call it).

You should work in this colour space to prevent any changes being made whilst viewing online.
 
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