What's going on here? Colour issues

[terry.langham]

After upgrading to windows 7 I was mucking around with some old average photos in PS and decided to use one as a desktop background. On the desktop it looks unsaturated and contrasty, whereas when viewing exactly the same file it looks as intended.

[William]

The bigger image looks closer to the mark on my Calibrated Monitor Terry , The small one looks overly saturated to me , I'm still running XP Pro SP2

[terry.langham]

I tend to agree with you William. Strangely enough, I PP'ed it to somewhere in between the way they are displayed here. I am working from a calibrated laptop monitor until I can sort out the Spyder software to calibrate my external LCD monitor.

[William]

:)No worries Terry, Hope you find the problem, My partner has a new computer, We have 4 now !! It's running i3 and windows 7 , Have'nt used it yet for any editing so I cant give you any help , Will watch this thread tho - Cheers mate :th3:

[terry.langham]

Turns out it is a colourspace issue. For some reason the original and the edits were assigned 'ProPhoto RGB' and not sRGB. Will fix it after work and see if it makes any difference.

[terry.langham]

I think I have it all sorted now. When I reloaded LR2 and CS3 they both set themselves to ProPhoto colourspace, and it took me a little while to figure out that LR was as much at fault as PS. Its interesting to see that the same 'program' displays the exact same file in two different 'pallettes'.

[arthurking83]

I think I have it all sorted now. When I reloaded LR2 and CS3 they both set themselves to ProPhoto colourspace, ....

Note: in my trying to find out more info on this topic of colourspaces and LR(3 in my case) I found that there is no option to alter the current colour space profile at all, and that it's stuck in the ProPhoto colourspace, but when exporting, you do have an option to set the colourspace to any variable you prefer.
I don't think this is ideal, in not having the option to change the working colourspace as the user requires.
Basically (as I understand it) to visually see what effect(if any) this has on the images being edited, you need to go into the print section and view the image in proof mode(rather than in real time, as you edit).

I think that if the imported image is a non raw file, such as tiff, jpg or any other and has a defined colourspace, it honours that colourspace.. but once again, there is no info or indication to confirm this.

Is this important and if so, why? :

Yes and I dunno!? :p

Well, to be honest, there is a small difference when viewing images(any type of images!!) and more so when they are monotone(in my case that's only ever B&W).
I have various software to select from, CaptureNX2, ViewNX2, FSViewer(my fave lightweight fast viewer!!) Window's built in PhotoViewer, Gimp, Paint.net, etc, etc as wel as LR.
Apart from a recent issue I had with CaptureNX2(now sorted) all image vieweing software except LR, displayed each image in the exact same manner, where LR was always slightly less contrasty.
This is also a side issue in using the various colour spaces avialable to you on your computer, and part of the reason for their existence.
So, in my case at least, LR is casting a different rendering of each image I open in it, when compared to the view I see in all other software(and I think it's to do with the inability to set the current working colourspace).
Also note tho, that this difference is not huge, and if you also get it, it may be generally unnoticeable on your computer too, unless you go looking for it. I didn't actualy go looking for it. I accidentally found this issue, when I discovered an even larger issue with image rendering I had in CaptureNX2(which turned out to be my graphics card driver, and now sorted).
I compared all image viewing software to find any clue as to why CNX2 was rendering images differently to all my other software, and hence found that LR3 renders slightly less contrasty than all other software.

[terry.langham]

Interesting observations there AK. Had to check them out for myself last night and there is a difference in how they are displayed in LR, was most notable on my laptop screen.

Since upgrading to a 50D using LR2 and CS3 has been a real pain. Adobe won't allow Camera RAW to update to the current model so LR has to make a .tiff copy to send to CS3, which means a 'great big new tax file' for every time you edit or revisit a RAW file. Was going to update both programs but just can't afford to at the moment. Not sure if converting the .CR2 files to .DNG will help but I probably should try, although I still have the issue if going back to older photos.

Come upgrade time I think I will be looking around at the alternative raw processing and DAM programs before committing to Adobe again.

[arthurking83]

I looked at the pros and cons of various DAM software, and the one that stood out the most was IDImager's software.

Can be as massively complicated as you want it to be, and also as simple as you like too.

What I generally do with it, is the simple easy .. ie. lazy!! .. way. I import/transfer(to PC) all images with my Nikon software, in this case Nikon Transfer, and add the keywording to the images via Nikon Transfer, as they're loaded onto the PC.
Then every now and then, I open IDImager to update the files I have transferred to the PC.. say every few months, weeks.. depending on how many images I've been capturing. It then updates it's database in the background.

This way I'm not simply locked into one program.
ie. LR's method of keywording is not recognised by either IDImager(unless you do a conversion whilst in IDImager), nor Nikon's software(ViewNX or CaptureNX). This way all images from now on are keyworded so that Nikon's software can read and understand the format, other software can also do the same(LR reads the keywording created via Nikon's software), and all my images are cataloged.
I think IDImager's keywording process is understood via Nikon's software, but I can't remember.. It recommends not to use keywording in this manner, ie to catalog images (or some other message to that effect), but I think I remember it working ok, and ViewNX seeing the keywording changes to those images. This ability is not really important for me, as I do it all in the transfer process from now on, but it may become important as I get back into the enormous task of keywording thousands of images that I hadn't done previously. IDImager's searching for (tagged, or not)images is really what I liked about the software. It tags images via the exif data too, so that I can see which images were captured with which lens, and so forth.

Note tho, the images that had been tagged were not all that many, and the first time I ran IDImager to begin the process of building up a catalog, IDImager took a painfully long time to build a catalog.. something like 4 days, nonstop, and the catalog was massively overly giogantic.. something like 6 or 8Gigs, but it did catalog 192,000 images.

The other benfit I think I liked was the 'open format' database it produces. It's readable by other non IDImager database software (apparently), which I thought must(or should) be a good thing... for posterity.
I know nothing of .... in fact I have negative knowledge of databases and such trivial matters.
It does also have some limited raw file handling/processing ability, but this aspect was of no interest to me at all.
It is 64bit compatible, and also soemthing to note too, no matter how much RAM you have installed, it will use it all up!(believe it will anyhow) when building or updating the database. I've never seen any program, including LR(64bit for me) use more than about 2 or so Gig of RAM(of my 8G installed) but IDImager managed to use up over 7Gig once while it was crunching some numbers. Quite common to see, and with the net result that your computer can become sluggish feeling(Windows at least, dunno about Mac).

[terry.langham]

Cheers AK, will check it out.

One of the things that does irritate me about LR is the keywording, its probably more to do with how I applied keywords. I have been using the Sets and Collections to great effect recently and have all but stopped applying keywords to new photos, as it is much easier to dump them into a quick collection or hit 'b' to add them to the 'target collection'. The layout of the collection panel also takes up a lot less screen estate then the find/search panels.