What is going on?

[Mitchell]

Some advice:

I was about to post some photos when I noticed that they looked much more pale and washed out than I remembered.

Viewing them directly from my webpage they are pale and washed out, however if I right click on the image, save it and open it in photoshop, the image is back to its proper colourful self.

All viewing it on the same screen.

Any ideas on the difference?

[Jamie]

Welcome to my nightmare!

I'm yet to solve the problem so i live with it, its something to do with your monitor colour profile and the way images are viewed on the web, AFAIK anyway.

[Onyx]

Colourspace.

sRGB vs AdobeRGB. IN summary, stick with an all sRGB workflow.

Search this site for a half a week's worth of reading....

[the foto fanatic]

As Onyx says, do a few searches here for colour space.

But anything being shown on the web should be sRGB because that works best with browsers. Some people use Adobe RGB for PP, storing and printing stages and convert to sRGB for posting to the internet.

[avkomp]

like the others have said, this will be a colourspace issue.

cant really expand on what has already been stated except state my preferences.

basically I have the camera set to adobe rgb colourspace (mainly because I believe it allows for a wider range of colours) my computer monitor is calibrated and I have photoshop set to use adobe rgb. If I need to print stuff, I am pretty assured of getting the same result of the printer as is on my screen.
Adobe rgb doesnt display correctly in internet explorer, producing washed out colours. the browser is assuming SRGB pictures and displays them accordingly.

I convert images intended for the web to srgb and then save them so that they display correctly.

A lot of people will tell you to stick entirely in srgb to avoid issues such as you are having.
Perhaps to keep things simple this may well work for you, especially if the primary medium for displaying you stuff is on the web.

whether using argb or srgb is better is similar to holden vs ford and people will all have their opinions.

Steve

[Steffen]

I agree, your issue is most likely one of misinterpreted RGB values.

Those RGB values don't have absolute meanings, what they look like is highly device specific. In order to have them displayed correctly on the output device you would have to know how the output device behaves (i.e know its profile) and calculate the RGB values with that in mind.

This is obviously not feasible for images that are to be viewed on thousands of different people's monitors. Hence, you encode your RGB values for a hypothetical device, such as the ones characterised by sRGB or aRGB. It is then up to the viewer's end to make final adjustments in order to account for differences between sRGB/aRGB and the real output device.

Those final adjustments depend on a) the viewer knowing how to correctly interpret the sRGB or aRGB values (i.e. knowing what they mean in absolute colour terms, such as CIE LAB or CIE XYZ), and b) to know how the display monitor behaves (i.e. knowing the display device profile). It can then transform the RGB values in your image file to CIE LAB or XYZ, as prescribed by the sRGB or aRGB profile, and from there build RGB values to send to the video card/monitor according to the display device's profile.

Both a) and b) are often not given for viewing with web browsers. First, the browser is usually agnostic to profiles (most quietly assume something close to sRGB) and second, they don't make use of the platform's colour management features (if any) to take advantage of the monitor profile (if any).

Hence, the common situation is a web browser that interprets RGB values in image files according to sRBG (or thereabouts), and a monitor whose profile is either not known or not used by the browser. The best you can hope for in that case is that the monitor has been calibrated to something close to sRGB behaviour.

As file creator, the best you can do is convert your files to sRGB upon saving. That way the majority of colour agnostic browsers and un-profiled monitors might still get a reasonable approximation of what you had intended.

Alternatively, you can hope that most members of this forum view posted images with colour management aware software and use accurate profiles for their monitors...

Cheers
Steffen.

[stubbsy]

Mitch

What the others have said.

Also have a read of THIS POST although the images are now missing for me because of Pixspot!