Washed out colours...is it my camera setting?

Foggy

Foggy

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Name
Chris
Edit My Images
Yes
I took a few photos over the weekend, one of which was of my daughter playing with her toy camera. I cropped it in Lightroom and then did an export to jpeg to upload to the internet. When I opened the image in Preview it was fine, when opened in Firefox, however, it was really washed out. I thought it was going to be something in Lightroom so I tried opening it in Photoshop and changing colour profiles (tried every one in the list), did a Save for Web as each of them and they were all washed out.

At this point I thought I would see if it was an Adobe issue, so opened the image in Aperture and did an export, have the same issue.

The only way I can get close to the what I see in Aperture and Lightroom is to set the saturation up +50 before exporting. Here is an example of a straight export:
1398598672_5a749f2142_o.jpg



and this is more what I see in Aperture/Lightroom/Photoshop:
1398599320_bb6bce9830_o.jpg


The only thing I can think of is on my Nikon D40 I have in the custom image Color Mode it is set to IIIa (sRGB), rather than Ia (sRGB) which I have read gives less dynamic colours.

Anyone got any suggestions? I assume shooting in RAW would overcome this (at the expense of significantly larger files)
 
The first one looks pretty much spot on. The 2nd is almost neuclear in intensity.

If it was a sunny day then I'd say your colour balance was set for a bit cold, but other than that .. no problem.
 
mebbe your monitor needs calibration?
I agree with oG, #1 looks fine,
#2 does glow in the dark a bit!
 
The thing is - I prefer #1 as well, but the thing that is doing my nut in is that the version I am seeing in the editing software is different to the version that is being exported/saved for the web. I have tried changing all the flippin settings on the camera to no avail, have also tried shooting in RAW and the same issue.

It makes it really hard to do PP when you know the exported result is going to look different to what you see on the screen.
 
Nice natural colour there - can't see a problem. :)
 
#1 is the right one, #2 is far too saturated. I use the Srgb colour space on my camera and photoshop.
 
The problem I am having though, is that in Aperture, Lightroom, CS and Preview they all show the more saturated version, so if I do any editing and colour balancing then when I do save a jpeg version for the web that version is coming out desaturated. Here is a screenshot in Photoshop CS3 showing both the image on the left and the 'SaveForWeb' preview on the right:

Picture%201.jpg


So basically it is stopping me doing any PP as I have no idea what its going to end up like.

Doing my nut in atm!!!
 
You'r doing a colour space conversion. Thats wot that is.

You should make sure that you are on sRGB (or same throughout)
Adobe RGB is a more washed out version.

Have a snoop around here for sRGB there are plenty of peeps that have fallen foul of this
 
Hmm...thats what I thought it was as well after checking a few posts but according to Photoshop I am running sRGB IEC61966-2.1 - I have also checked by going Edit->Convert To Profile and got the same in there. I also have the same issue in Aperture.

What is interesting though is that if I copy the image across to my windows machine, open it in Photoshop there and do a Save for Web then I have no colour change. If it was just the adobe products doing it I could understand it, but Aperture seems to be doing the same thing.
 
When you save for web make sure you have the little box ticked that says 'include icc profile' or some such.

You can see the differnt colours viewed in different colour spaces by clicking the little arrow at the top, it gives you several options like 'windows corrected, windows uncomopensated etc.

Hope that helps?
 
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