- This topic has 18 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 4 years, 5 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I’m having issues with colors and how they appear in different applications. I’ve spent hours researching and cannot figure out what is going on and hoping I can find some help here.
I have dual displays, both the exact same model (Samsung monitors I purchased over 10 years ago). I’ve calibrated them both using a Spyder 2 Express and DisplayCal (I believe I’ve followed all necessary instructions for my calibration device). Overall I’m pleased with how colors look on my display.
I have sRGB as my working space in Lightroom and Photoshop CC and the sRGB color profile assigned to all relevant images. In the Adobe programs and in Firefox the colors are consistent, but when I view my files in the Windows Photos app, in Chrome, or on a separate mobile device, the contrast is to high and the saturation off and it’s too green/yellow.
Way back in the day I didn’t have this issue but much has changed since then, I upgraded some of the hardware in my tower (new motherboard), upgraded to Windows 10, and began using DisplayCal all around the same time. I’ve had this issue for awhile and I think it popped up after the first time I used DisplayCal. I thought that it was just a problem with my Windows Photos viewer so I didn’t bother fixing it. But I recently realized they look like that oh my phone, etc… which means it probably looks that bad on other devices when my clients view them.
If I take a screenshot of the image open in Photoshop, then paste that into a new document in Photoshop the colors change (I’m assuming because the screenshot doesn’t have a color profile assigned?) If I use the Proof Setup option in Photoshop and choose “monitor RGB” it will reflect the same colors I see in other apps (high contrast, etc..) If I convert my color profile from sRGB to the profile created by display cal, it shows the contrast-y one as well. If I view the image in FastStone image viewer it’s high-contrast until I chance the color settings and check the box that says “auto detect and use monitor color profile”
I’ve read that it could be because the other apps don’t manage colors. But it seems like an extreme difference and I don’t see how many artists out there can post their work online in portfolios and they look great in Chrome or on Instagram on my phone, and yet mine look awful.
I guess what I’m wondering is which of the two I’m seeing is “accurate?” How can I tell? Is there is something in the process used for DisplayCal that I am using incorrectly and need to fix? If all else fails how do I completely undo all the calibration I’ve done using DiplayCal so I can start from scratch?
I’m attaching one of my images as a PNG (sRGB) and a screenshot comparing the results I’m getting.
I appreciate any insight I can get, thanks!
Windows Photos is not color managed so it cannot be used as reference, old windows viewer use color management (not perfect but good if not in fullscreen), try to restore it (requeres a registry trick, google it).
Photoshop, GIMP (make sure you check configuration) & Firefox (make sure you check configuration and use images with embeded profiles) are color managed, so they should be your reference about how images should like… but make sure that you use images with embeded profiles (like sRGB and such).
Also it’s very likely that Spyder2 is not reliable at all after these years.
old windows viewer use color management
Only matrix part of profiles though, no cLUT profile support.
Windows Photos is not color managed so it cannot be used as reference
Photoshop, GIMP (make sure you check configuration) & Firefox (make sure you check configuration and use images with embeded profiles) .
Also it’s very likely that Spyder2 is not reliable at all after these years.
The elephant in the room is that this desktop ICC technology is not leading many people to better results as there are so many variables, mis-steps, and failure modes.
I appreciate the value of these tools, and the results can be very well worth it when they are understood and applied properly.
But we should notice that this forum and elsewhere across the web there are decades of reports of trouble and no end of people at all levels of expertise wondering why things are going wrong.
It’s a crazy tech treadmill that for the creative end-user who wants to think he has a creative life outside endless perseveration over his tools is not living up to industry promises. And the industry itself doesn’t even understand this stuff! If this was just a recent condition because of tech inflections… But, no, the problems are the same or worse than 20 years ago!
I read VIncent’s recommendations to a guy on another thread who is struggling with white points between his newish Mac and an outboard monitor and it’s like reading a foreign language! The poor guy is just doing his best to hold on and say well I’m trying to discover whether my Mac is P3 capable so he even knows if he’s talking the right ju-ju and the answer to that question is a quagmire about LED chemistry, colorimeter corrections, etc., my god.
Telling someone to read and comprehend the DisplayCal documentation is basically saying, you need to do about 3 solid days of careful study, experiments and analysis just so you understand the application domain. The sheer degrees of jargon, caveats, edge cases, and pitfalls are dumbfounding.
But it goes much further into arcane aspects of ICC color. For example, when I am editing a forum post on my iOS phone, the color blue of this blue text box background is almost exactly the same as the editing controls. You can’t see the insertion point!
My god, I’m sitting on the one of the worlds biggest reserves of practical ICC color expertise for support of a program that rivals the Eagle Lunar Lander in both mechanical and mission complexity, and no one has considered the the color of the user forum makes editing controls invisible in one of the most common use cases
Gads people!!!!
The elephant in the room is that this desktop ICC technology is not leading many people to better results as there are so many variables, mis-steps, and failure modes.
That’s an over-generalization if there ever was one – in fact, most people never have any major issues, especially those that “just” want correct color in their image editor.
But we should notice that this forum and elsewhere across the web there are decades of reports of trouble and no end of people at all levels of expertise wondering why things are going wrong.
As with any technical field. But the number of these reports still pales in comparison to those that never feel the need to ask for help, because “it just works” for them (and their use case). Thus, focusing only on those that have trouble tends to give a very skewed view of the overall situation.
Telling someone to read and comprehend the DisplayCal documentation is basically saying, you need to do about 3 solid days of careful study, experiments and analysis just so you understand the application domain. The sheer degrees of jargon, caveats, edge cases, and pitfalls are dumbfounding.
Typically, all the info you need is to read the (brief) quickstart guide and the help text on the main tab.
But it goes much further into arcane aspects of ICC color. For example, when I am editing a forum post on my iOS phone, the color blue of this blue text box background is almost exactly the same as the editing controls. You can’t see the insertion point!
Can’t reproduce. This is what it looks like for me:
Here’s what I see.
Where’s the insertion point in the first one? It’s there!
I struggle with poor acuity under ideal conditions btw.
There are two images. The first on has the text insertion point ahead of the d in documentation. The second one shows the absurdly low contrast of text selection using cut/paste
Not sure why my insertion point is blue and yours is white?
Probably controlled by iOS. I don’t think I can override that. Typical Apple. “Think different”.
My phone and computers do way more crazy stuff than this so it’s not like it’s some aberration 🙂 It’s my continual amazement at how many ways this tech goes wrong that makes me hyperbolic.
Like right now the text boxes are not letting me scroll, lord knows why.
You seem fairly well inured to the craziness, like most ubergeeks. I understand.
Nonetheless, imagine how many users just throw up their hands and skip posting their troubles here because their Apple is doing something crazy…
The absence of proof is not proof of absence—Wirth or Dykstra or Knuth or von Neumann or somebody
“You can make a system fool proof, but you can’t make it damn fool proof”
I’m glad my post could spark some discussion on the issues with color and technology. It is complicated, even more than most people realize until they start digging. I’m grateful for free programs like DisplayCAL that allow me to have control over much of the complicated process, even if it hurts my brain trying to understand it all sometimes. 🙂
Anyway, I thought I’d pop on and post an update to my own issues.
It was frustrating to be one of those people who were having issues and not able to find “the answer.” I had come across a number of discussions about the way different programs managed color but I wasn’t satisfied. I figured there had to be a way that industry professionals could at least be reasonably satisfied that their end product/image would appear accurately to most of their audience. Otherwise how could photographers sell presets, for example, if customers can’t trust that the examples they’re seeing in Chrome will closely reflect the results they would get in Lightroom when using those presets?
I’m sure I could improve my colors by purchasing newer monitors and a new calibration device (those things are still on the wishlist) but I was/am not prepared to spend the money at the moment to find out and needed a reliable answer in the meantime. Especially since using the same monitors and calibration device in the past I was able to have accurate (enough) color. I was once content, then I wasn’t, and now I am again content.
This is what ended up helping me…
I re-calibrated using the old Sypder 2 and DisplayCAL but this time I set Tone Curve to “sRGB” in the Calibration tab (it was previously set to Gamma 2.2). I don’t know if this was the “right” thing to do or even exactly why it worked but now the Adobe applications more closely match what I see in non-color managed apps.
So I THINK my issue was the profile created when I originally calibrated. The color managed apps were referencing that profile and showing me the “badly” color-managed version. Once I re-calibrated with the new tone curve, the profile that loaded in those apps is now accurate and reliable. Am I correct in this assumption? Because I can also imagine that what I did was essentially the same as limiting the color range to sRGB. If someone who understands this better would like to elaborate I’d love to satisfy my curiosity!
I have to be honest, even if my solution isn’t technically perfect I’m okay with that. Because now I can edit in those programs and what most people see is closer to what I want them to see.
Hey Brittany, Some additional comments and questions per the stuff you’ve shared:
For photographers wishing to have predictability from their seat to the world at large, aligning to sRGB is the “right” thing to do, because it’s the most normal.
Are you are using a wide gamut display?
If so, did you make adjustments to its settings?
Does choosing the sRGB preset in DisplayCal create a profile that limits gamut of the display?
If the only difference between your previous setup and this one which works better for you is the tone curve, there’s probably something else going on. The differences between sRGB TRC and G2.2 TRC are so minor for photography that you are truly sweating the details if you see that one works but the other doesn’t.
Which brings us back to points about how you can trust your setup and getting lost in the myriad tech details.
WRT to your open question about “how can Lightroom presets be sold on the web if customers can’t trust what they see in Chrome” There are many finer points of explanation, here’s a casual survey:
- Users who don’t get involved in custom color management never notice a discrepancy because most of the web looks consistent under their regime of ignorance.
- Users who target sRGB don’t encounter as many discrepancies because they’ve normalized to the de facto standard which tends to work across all the web, and when something does look wrong they can chalk it up to someone else’s error for doing something non-standard. (Srsly, who posts AdobeRGB with an embedded profile for any reason than to question whether your browser is dumb? )
- Users cannot easily compare their system rendering with others’, so they only notice internal inconsistencies. (This is what’s keeping most forum participants busy)
- Users don’t carefully compare the web demo of the preset with its Lightroom behavior so they never notice.
- Chrome isn’t the only browser and others do CM.
- Users tolerate that this stuff is always going wrong!
- Users are artists who thrive on the mysterious and uncertain, like when shooting color with an old Holga with light leaks and you don’t care and you underexpose by 2 stops and push development by 3!
So in the end are you saying that you think that something was going wrong, which remains unknown, but it got fixed when you re-calibrated, and along the way you decided to target sRGB as that seems a sane way to go and now things basically work?
Re your attachments. These look the same to me. Is that what you intend?
(Look at my attachment: my phone has a white rectangle in the text entry box rendering which hides everything underneath it; I wish I could also show you how the text cursor and selection overlays go crazy and become detached from the text. Why is this happening Apples?!)
Hey Brittany, Some additional comments and questions per the stuff you’ve shared:
For photographers wishing to have predictability from their seat to the world at large, aligning to sRGB is the “right” thing to do, because it’s the most normal.
Are you are using a wide gamut display?
I don’t think so? They’re more than 10 years old and not very expensive. How would I know? I’ve just gone off the assumption that they’re not. Here’s a link to the kind of monitors I have https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SyncMaster-2253BW-22-inch-Monitor/dp/B0013PSOT0
If so, did you make adjustments to its settings?
I messed with some basic brightness and gamma settings using the tools in Windows 10 when I was trying to fix my issues. But the when I employed the profiles I created it would revert so I’m not sure it had a relevant effect.
Does choosing the sRGB preset in DisplayCal create a profile that limits gamut of the display?
If the only difference between your previous setup and this one which works better for you is the tone curve, there’s probably something else going on. The differences between sRGB TRC and G2.2 TRC are so minor for photography that you are truly sweating the details if you see that one works but the other doesn’t.
While I have been known to sweat the details I’m confident this was a noticeable difference. I suspect there was more going on like you say.
Which brings us back to points about how you can trust your setup and getting lost in the myriad tech details.
WRT to your open question about “how can Lightroom presets be sold on the web if customers can’t trust what they see in Chrome” There are many finer points of explanation, here’s a casual survey:
- Users who don’t get involved in custom color management never notice a discrepancy because most of the web looks consistent under their regime of ignorance.
- Users who target sRGB don’t encounter as many discrepancies because they’ve normalized to the de facto standard which tends to work across all the web, and when something does look wrong they can chalk it up to someone else’s error for doing something non-standard. (Srsly, who posts AdobeRGB with an embedded profile for any reason than to question whether your browser is dumb? )
- Users cannot easily compare their system rendering with others’, so they only notice internal inconsistencies. (This is what’s keeping most forum participants busy)
- Users don’t carefully compare the web demo of the preset with its Lightroom behavior so they never notice.
- Chrome isn’t the only browser and others do CM.
- Users tolerate that this stuff is always going wrong!
- Users are artists who thrive on the mysterious and uncertain, like when shooting color with an old Holga with light leaks and you don’t care and you underexpose by 2 stops and push development by 3!
Yep, most of these thoughts were racing through my head while I was contemplating my frustrations. I felt that the results I was getting by using my previously calibrated profile were “bad.” I felt I was producing edits that most skilled artists would have found too extreme, even though in my Adobe apps I was careful to find just the right balance of color and contrast. I go for dramatic but not extreme. I like to think that those professionals out there who are creating quality work are able to work with some semblance of consistency between their applications (meaning both software applications and their outputs). Now I’m just rambling. I think it’s safe to say I’m now at a place where I’m happy with what most users are going to see when they view my work online (whether in a CM viewer or not) and in how they print for myself and my clients. I’m sure better monitors and such would be an improvement but I am currently content. Which is a nice feeling compared to the frustration I had for so long.
So in the end are you saying that you think that something was going wrong, which remains unknown, but it got fixed when you re-calibrated, and along the way you decided to target sRGB as that seems a sane way to go and now things basically work?
Yes, that’s exactly where I ended up.
Re your attachments. These look the same to me. Is that what you intend?
The attachments in my original post show the difference between what I saw in Photoshop vs non-color managed apps. The difference was too much for me. The attachment in my latest reply shows the new “fixed” results between photoshop and the non-color managed Windows 10 Photos app. And that is what I intended.
(Look at my attachment: my phone has a white rectangle in the text entry box rendering which hides everything underneath it; I wish I could also show you how the text cursor and selection overlays go crazy and become detached from the text. Why is this happening Apples?!)
That’s crazy! And frustrating. I am not an Apple user and can’t relate but usability issues like that drive me nuts lol.
