Adobe RBG - sRBG...Enlightenment Please? Since joining UHH, I've posted numerous photos with no feedback about color space. But recently, it was kindly noted that they should be posted...

Photobum Loc: Auburn, Washington

Since joining UHH, I've posted numerous photos with no feedback about color space. But recently, it was kindly noted that they should be posted on the web as sRBG instead of Adobe RBG, if I'm understanding this correctly. Could someone help my understanding this - in laymen's terms? Any help would be welcome. Ken

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Here's two legacy links that overlap, but if you spent some time reading both and looking at the examples, the impact of using a colorspace other than sRGB for your online posts should be explained. Using the universal sRGB colorspace assures your images have a consistent look, always, in all browsers, all operating systems, and all situations, both thumbnails and downloaded attachments.

My photos uploaded to UHH contest look washed out

sRGB vs Adobe RGB

Photobum Loc: Auburn, Washington

Ok.. Thank you so much!🙂

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Here is a link to some reading about the subject. He provides some test images with tabs showing the effects of different color spaces. He also explains why it is important to embed a color profile in the metadata.
http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page1

Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

With some photos on UHH it's not that obvious between the thumbnail and the download, with others it's crazy-different, such as the example in Paul's first link.

Given how many people probably view thumbnail only, I would want my pics to display the "correct" way up front. I've dabbled on other forums, such as fredmiranda.com, and there is no issue (same with flickr and others) - I assume because those are direct uploads, not embedded and reduced for the thumbnail view.

Ysarex Loc: St. Louis

Linda From Maine wrote:

With some photos on UHH it's not that obvious between the thumbnail and the download, with others it's crazy-different, such as the example in Paul's first link.

Given how many people probably view thumbnail only, I would want my pics to display the "correct" way up front. I've dabbled on other forums, such as fredmiranda.com, and there is no issue (same with flickr and others) - I assume because those are direct uploads, not embedded and reduced for the thumbnail view.

The issue here at UHH is that the forum software strips the EXIF data including the ICC profile tag from uploaded photos when it re-sizes them. It doesn't have to do that -- as you noted there's no problem with Flickr and that includes the re-sized versions.

As a result here at UHH, a photography forum, all user photos on the forum pages are displayed with colors undefined.

Joe

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Ysarex wrote:

The issue here at UHH is that the forum software strips the EXIF data including the ICC profile tag from uploaded photos when it re-sizes them. It doesn't have to do that -- as you noted there's no problem with Flickr and that includes the re-sized versions.

As a result here at UHH, a photography forum, all user photos on the forum pages are displayed with colors undefined.

Joe

That's a very authoritatively stated guess and not consistent with my observations ...

Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

Ysarex wrote:

The issue here at UHH is that the forum software strips the EXIF data including the ICC profile tag from uploaded photos when it re-sizes them. It doesn't have to do that -- as you noted there's no problem with Flickr and that includes the re-sized versions.

As a result here at UHH, a photography forum, all user photos on the forum pages are displayed with colors undefined.

Joe

My thumbnails on UHH look the same as my downloaded photos, as do hundreds thousands of others. Only those not posted with sRGB color space have an issue.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Photobum wrote:

Since joining UHH, I've posted numerous photos with no feedback about color space. But recently, it was kindly noted that they should be posted on the web as sRBG instead of Adobe RBG, if I'm understanding this correctly. Could someone help my understanding this - in laymen's terms? Any help would be welcome. Ken

The best practice these days is to edit in ProPhoto, and once you have all of your color work completed, reduce the color space to sRGB, which is universal. There is a school of thought that completely ignores proper color gamut characteristics and suggests that you should set your editing color space to the same as your final output. However, the camera captures the widest gamut, displays can show up to Adobe RGB, some printers can print greater than Adobe RGB - so there will be gamut mismatches. Editing can often result in out of gamut colors that can more easily be resolved when you are adjusting an image in a wider gamut color space during editing and softproofing.

But for exporting to this site (and many others) sRGB is the way to go.

Ysarex Loc: St. Louis

CHG_CANON wrote:

That's a very authoritatively stated guess and not consistent with my observations ...

It's not a guess. I checked and it's correct.

Joe

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

Ysarex wrote:

It's not a guess. I checked and it's correct.

Joe

Checked what? That an attachment is modified and different in terms of colorspace when downloaded back? That the thumbnail ignores or is otherwise different than the full-sized attachment when it includes sRGB? Some other relevant topic?

Ysarex Loc: St. Louis

Linda From Maine wrote:

My thumbnails on UHH look the same as my downloaded photos, as do hundreds thousands of others. Only those not posted with sRGB color space have an issue.

That makes sense (although you don't really know about the thousands of others) and is not inconsistent with what I posted.

Joe

Ysarex Loc: St. Louis

CHG_CANON wrote:

Checked what?

Checked that UHH strips off EXIF data including ICC tag when it re-sizes photos for display on the forum pages.

Joe

CHG_CANON wrote:

That an attachment is modified and different in terms of colorspace when downloaded back? That the thumbnail ignores or is otherwise different than the full-sized attachment when it includes sRGB? Some other relevant topic?

Linda From Maine Loc: Yakima, Washington

Ysarex wrote:

That makes sense (although you don't really know about the thousands of others) and is not inconsistent with what I posted.

Joe

Yeah, I'm pretty sure about the "thousands" - take a look at my number of comments in 7.5 years

Ysarex Loc: St. Louis

Linda From Maine wrote:

Yeah, I'm pretty sure about the "thousands" - take a look at my number of comments in 7.5 years

Sure about what? You don't know what they see.

You said; "Only those not posted with sRGB color space have an issue." The fact is UHH treats all uploads the same -- it strips off the ICC tags and leaves them with no color space. An sRGB tagged photo will have it's color space tag stripped off just as an Adobe RGB or ProPhoto tagged photo will have it's color space stripped off.

If you're going to do that and remove a photo's color space profile and then display that image with basically the monitor's color space odds are you'll see the smallest difference between what had been an sRGB image and the displayed un-tagged image.

Joe