Two Dogwood Blossoms
I continue with the Dogwoods. Only two in this image. Taken indoors with window light.
Texture by Coffee House, vignette in CEP, Denoise with Topaz.
When I convert to sRGB for posting, the colors change and also become less saturated. I added saturation . But, this version seems to have more green, which I don't like, in the vignette than my RGB version.
Do others convert color profile before posting?
This is like 2 happy faces! I like the two small leaves of contrasting green and the soft texture of the bkgd with the slight vignette. I suspect Diane will let us know about the color changes when posting. I too, am interested in the answer.
Gorgeous -- I love dogwood!
It just not an option to not convert to sRGB before posting to the web. If you don't, and further if you don't embed the profile, many people will see the colors incorrectly. See my 2 articles in Educational Resources. Any color change on conversion to sRGB should be almost imperceptible. (But don't pay any attention to the Preview section in the Save for web dialog. It is a legacy thing and not applicable to what we do as photographers. It does not affect the output.
Two reasons you might be seeing color changes: the original was way too saturated and out of gamut for sRGB, or possibly you assigned sRGB instead of converting.
Thank you.Originally Posted by Diane Miller
What do you mean about assigning sRGB instead of converting? That might be what I'm doing.
I don't remember if you still have PS Elements or upgraded to PS. In PS in the Edit menu there are 2 option for Assign Profile and Convert to Profile. Assign is never the correct choice in a normal photo work flow. It is for an image or a scan than came to someone with no profile attached and they need to use it, or view it correctly, especially its histogram. In that case they have to guess at the correct profile and assign it. (I do that when I grab an image posted here that didn't have a profile attached and I want to see what it might have been.) But when going from a normal editing workflow to output an image, if it's for the web you need to use the Convert to Profile option. That will not change colors noticeably unless the image was way over-saturated in a wider gamut.
But if you're using Save for Web you don't need to convert first (although no harm either). There is a checkbox in the dialog for Convert to sRGB. And one for Embed profile. Neither is an option -- do both. In the newer Export dialog in PS CC, as well as in the LR Export dialog, the embed step is automatic, as omitting it is simply not the thing to do. There is no reason for not including it. The possibility of not embedding is an ancient legacy thing when there was concern about the miniscule increase in file size it caused for loading speed of graphics-intensive web pages, and that was way before wide-gamut monitors came out, so everyone was presumed to be seeing only an sRGB gamut anyway. That is so last-century now.
This dogwood does show sRGB embedded, so the only possibility is that maybe you were doing a separate step before that to Assign sRGB. I doubt it, but it is possible.
Can you explain where (at what step) you see color changes? (And what software.) If you see them in the Preview section of the Save for Web dialog, that is another old legacy thing. Ignore it -- it does NOT affect the output. It is mercifully not in the new Export dialog.
The two articles attempt to explain it all.
Diane:
Thanks!!!
I was assigning, not converting. That was my mistake.
I am now working in PS. I don't see an option for Save for Web.
I was making the assigning at the end of all the editing.
Thank you for your detailed explanation!
I hope you were not saving your master files with the assigned profile.... If so the only way to restore the (approximately) correct appearance is with saturation.
Do you have PS CS6 or PS CC? With CS 6, Save for Web is under the File menu. With CC the legacy Save for Web is now hidden in the File > Export menu. Better to use the Export As option there. Fewer things to do wrong. Be sure to check to convert to sRGB.
Foe anyone with Lightroom, it's so easy to set up an export preset int he Export dialog (just put in the parameters and hit the + symbol at the bottom and give it a name. You can specify a max file size such as is needed here and it will use the highest quality to fit under that.
Diane:
I save my files with layers as TIFF. I then make a duplicate, flatten layers, and (now) convert to sRGB and save that separately. Since I don't use Lightroom, I have 4 versions of the photo: the RAW, the unprocessed TIFF, the edited TIFF with layers, and the jpeg (if I'm posting it).
Many thanks!!
Excellent!
Anita,
Greetings. Beautiful image. I particularly like the texture and the composition is just right. As far as the color goes...
Sigh. It's challenging, no, near impossible to get color to show up in a post consistently with how you see it. Converting to sRGB, and attaching the profile is good, perhaps, a happy medium. But the more saturated the original is the more variation in presentation the image will appear in the various browsers (Edge, Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc. ad infinitum). Many of these are supposed to be color managed (rolling eyes emoticon here), which means you should be able to post in any profile (if the profile is attached) and have it appear the same in each browser (then you only have to deal with monitor differences ;-), but it isn't so. Sigh.
Sorry for the rant. Converting to sRGB and posting with profile attached is good. As an aside I use Chrome and am happiest with it as presenting images as I see them in Photoshop and Lightroom. Maybe only 1 in 4 photos that I post look "right" to me in Edge (or the Windows Photos app on my desktop). The rest look remarkably different in the array of viewers and browsers at my disposal. I've learned to breath deeply and let it go (for the most part).
Cheers,
-Michael-
Thanks, Michael, for your comments.
With Diane's help, I now properly "convert" my images to sRGB, as I used to do when I used Elements, and I notice very little change.
Like you, I use Chrome for the color rendition.
Our camera club has struggled for years with the color of projected images. We recently bought a new projector, which does a much better job of rendering the colors and saturation and brightness like the image seen on the computer monitor or the print. I like to submit my images to the club competitions as prints, that way I know the color is what I want it to be, plus, I love prints. (I don't do the printing myself; a friend does it.)
Very good points by Michael, and very true. But some people sadly use those issues to ignore using proper color management, which is simple once you know how and why. The issues of different browsers pale in comparison to viewing an untagged image on a wide gamut monitor with a browser that will slam it into the monitor's gamut. There's a tutorial for that, too. I haven't kept up with the latest with browsers, but for years I've used Firefox with a setting to assume an untagged image is sRGB, which it often is. I've never seen any difference at all in my posts vs. their appearance in PS.
And projectors... the Mariana Trench of color management. Prints are a great idea but of course have their own color management issues.
I like what you've done with this. The positions of the two blossoms nicely balance the image vertically and horizontally, but the diagonal and the position of the right one with respect to the stem make it more dynamic. Good choice of background, too. It's variable enough to be pleasing in its own right, and the color goes well with the stamens, the stems, and the tips of the petals. I agree with Nancy about the contrast the leaves add.
Diane and Michael, thanks for all the technical information on what happens to color.
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