Today starts the new theme of blurs. For me blurring water using in-camera settings is a lot of fun. I enjoy seeing how I can change the results with different settings. To this in-camera blur I added a layer from Topaz Simplify 4, oil paint, selectively reducing the opacity.
I am having color issues. Somewhere between my computer and BPN reds are added. Those little reddish-orange spots in the upper rocks are less obvious when I view them on my screen, as well as on the preview screen I see when I use "save for the web". Any ideas what my problem is?
Hi, Nancy, hopefully Diane Miller will see your post and be able to answer - I sure don't know. The whole image looks a little dark on my screen but I'm not sure if you wanted it to be kind of dark and mysterious. I also love all of the different looks you can get from running water
Greetings. The water is very cool. I like the color palette of the scene. Regarding the color problems... Could be in the transition from (in PS it is called) working space color profile to sRGB which happens in "save for web"... do you see the issue in the resulting jpeg? Try opening the jpeg with your browser. Should look the same as on bpn since your image is tagged with sRGB.
Unfortunately, even if the image is tagged, different renderers: browsers, image viewers, printers, etc. have different "takes" on the image. Sometimes it's just the particular color, red in this instance, that falls in a bad spot in the gamut of one or more of the devices so a seemingly off color is presented.
This is a most dramatic image Nancy with an old world painterly effect. The image also appears a bit dark on my screen with loss of details in the shadows.
I like how the image is so different along the diagonal line, the top left side appears sharp, where the lower right is blurred. I like the effect, cool image all around. TFS
Thanks all for your comments! Michael, I'll check on what I see. On the laptop at the moment. Gary, think I'll experiment with getting some details back in the deep shadows.
You're describing an incompatibility between colors shown in PS and your browser.
I'd first (just as a matter of routine) want to be sure PS is set up correctly and the monitor is calibrated and profiled, but the issue is most likely with your browser.
Several times lately people have talked about color shifts on going to sRGB. In one case it was because they were viewing the JPEG in Windows Explorer, which is not color-managed -- i.e. won't display colors correctly. But that's not what you described.
Have a look at the sticky in ETL on "Seeing Images Properly..." If that doesn't fix things, keep shouting!
I kind of like it without detail in the shadows. It makes it more ominous and makes the lighter water in the center really pop. Great mood on this one Nancy!
I love the effect but would love to see a bit more on top as the 2 rocks cut off by the frame edge bug me. "If an object is worth including in the frame be sure to include the whole thing with a border...."
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I went back and checked the original and I do not have the top bit of the upper rock.
As for the color issues, with a bunch of help from Diane & Michael I have discovered that using the Internet Explorer browser adds more saturation to my images, especially in the reds. I have switched to Firefox and it appears to match the colors from my images better. I did not realize that browsers have such an impact on the colors of the images.
Sadly, many browsers are not color managed (that's geek talk for the not-so-simple task of displaying colors correctly). And browsers vary with the age of the computer operating system -- the trend is toward improvement but not all are there yet.
This image is correctly converted to sRGB and that profile tagged. That's as good as it can get, and if it is displaying incorrectly in IE, that is a major black eye forn the browser / operating system. An image that is not converted to sRGB and untagged is the worst case and can be displayed very inaccurately.
Firefox should display the same colors as Photoshop, if PS is set up correctly -- not just be "better." Even if the monitor is off, it should be off equally for both. (But maybe not with some versions of Windows??)
But the perception of an image can change with the screen background. I set my computer desktop color to gray and keep as much bling as possible off the screen. And I keep the environment a "dimroom". That helps even things out.
Just to be clear... both Internet Explorer and Firefox are color managed. The problem Nancy was seeing was not due to color management issues. Unfortunately, color management isn't the end all of colors matching from one output to another. Nancy might be less happy with Firefox if the image were rich with violets, purples and blues.
There isn't any way to get into discussing consistent color across displays without getting headache inducing, so I'll just give my opinion, which is there is no way to display consistent color across multiple displays. You can pick two PS and a chosen browser. PS and a printer.
It's a drag and probably will not get solved, since it is a problem that really matters to very few. I have considered this problem off and on for many years in my professional work, too. My recommendation is to not to worry about it too much. Some people will see an oversaturated version of your image. Some people will see some ghastly skin tones. It is something you cannot control (for the most part... providing the opportunity to get close with color management by tagging your images is about all one can do).
I'm also pretty careful about color discussions during critique. They can be pretty odd... Imagine, Nancy, if someone commented that they thought your image over-saturated, particularly those red parts on the rocks. Heck, I made a comment just the other day about to much magenta that was more a monitor difference (I have warm and cool monitors, it looked fine on the other monitor).
I ramble.
Short version: tag the images you post, don't worry too much about the rest, careful with those color discussions.
Michael, I'm glad to see your input -- you know 1000x more about this stuff than I do. But Nancy's color difference issue isn't across different monitors -- it's between two different browsers on the same monitor.
Could it be that she's using an older version of IE? Nancy, what Windows and IE version do you have?
Granted, there is no way to get the same color for all viewers, with their different monitors, much less different operating systems and browsers. As you (and I) have said, you can only do your best by converting to sRGB and tagging. But differences in monitors is not the issue here. Why the difference between her IE and FF (and compared to what she sees in PS) if not a color management issue of some sort? Could a monitor profile be so far off as to cause those differences?
I wasn't saying Nancy's issue was with the monitor (my comment about magenta in an image was my bad on my monitors). Nancy's issue is definitely with Internet Explorer. I just wanted to emphasize that the issue is with the OP and different results may occur with different images (same browsers).
Internet Explorer has a somewhat unique take on color management, but it is color managed. Part of the issue is that sRGB itself was created for a CRT (cathode ray tube, remember those?) target. The weird thing is that as far as I know, IE might be better at hitting that target and Firefox may have pushed that target toward more current monitors.
Anyway FWIW... earlier I sent this to Nancy privately:
In order these are Photoshop, Microsoft Image Viewer, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox ( This is a screen capture to show the differences in these different viewers )
That's PS CC (2014) and most recent releases of the others. If you look closely, you'll see that they are all different (IE more different, though).
Remembering that you can't control what people use to look at BPN... people see even more variety than what is above.
Cheers,
-Michael-
Last edited by Michael Gerald-Yamasaki; 06-25-2014 at 04:34 PM.
Reason: added note
Interesting that the two outliers here seem to be MS's own Image Viewer (biased to green) and IE (biased to red).
Also interesting that FF may be re-interpreting sRGB, although it seems to be in agreement with PS and Chrome.
I'll grant that recent IE versions are color managed, but what about older versions and/or older OSs? Trying to understand this stuff from what is available on the Internet (much old) is headache-inducing, but I've gotten the impression that it hasn't always been managed. But maybe that is only in the case of not assuming that an untagged image is sRGB, which I understand FF does, with a switch set.
Are some browsers using monitor "profiles" instead of a calibration?