Lightroom: colors differ between in program and export

[Barracuda]

Okay y’all, riddle me this one – why in the world am I seeing one color within Lightroom, and a fairly significant shift after I export? I’ve tried changing my Export from sRGB to Adobe RGB and ProPhoto and that’s not it. It seems like all of the colors are getting shifted to a cooler hue on export.

I see it mostly when working with B&W and other limited palette photos, but even the wall color on my upcoming Apples v Oranges photos were shifted to a cooler hue upon export.

I’ll also mention, I made sure there’s nothing under “Post Process”, JPEG quality is 90, resize long-edge to 1600 is the other export options I typically have set. This is Lightroom 3.6, running on WinXP.

Oh, and the source file is a JPG, not RAW, on the example below.

Example:

Screen capture from Lightroom, this is what I see in Lightroom:

I export, and this is what I get instead:

[Barracuda]

Gaaaaahhhh, seems like its something to do with color profiles / color management. So I took my exported pictures (which look green hued to me in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, thumbnails, Chrome, etc – and imported those back into Lightroom – and they look the same as the source image that I exported from. I import the screen capture, and it’s shifted towards RED. Guess it’s time for me to dig deep into the interwebs and read up on proper screen calibrations and what (windows) programs do color management right. So darned much to learn.

[sleeping]

You want to convert to SRGB when exporting them, basically. Photo editing applications are color-space aware, but the Windows viewers and most browsers aren’t.

[Barracuda]

Yeah, had learned that much in my early reading, but if my colors are going to shift significantly when I export, I’d like of like to see what they’re going to look like after Export while IN Lightroom. Kind of like trying to shoot a rifle that hasn’t had it’s scope zero’ed in. You can be as careful and steady as you can be, but in the end you’re still throwing in Kentucky windage in order to hopefully hit your mark.

[Kestrana]

Came here to say what sleeping said but EW jpg. 😉

[Barracuda]

Well, here’s a twist, I had my coworker import my exported image into his Lightroom install here at work, and wonder of all wonders, it stayed pretty much the same with the green-tint look. Which means it’s actually my install of Lightroom which is not displaying colors “correctly” as it is the only odd duck out in this little experiment. So, now back to the internets in hopes of coming up with the right combination of search terms to find a similar situation and a solution to it. I’m going to calibrate my monitors at home, but it has to be something within lightroom or between lightroom and my display that’s doing this shift. :-/

[CauseISaidSo]

Barracuda, do you have a profile installed for your monitor(s) and if so, are you also instructing Lightroom to use a profile? I ran into that same issue when trying to figure our my color management problems. I think the profile ends up getting applied twice in that case, and if your coworker’s Lightroom doesn’t have a profile installed, that would explain the differences you’re seeing there.

If you do have a profile installed, it’s my experience that Windows Photo Viewer won’t reflect the way the images look in your profile-aware image application or browsers. I’m not sure what it does wrong, but with color-matching profiles installed for my monitors, I can get my photos to look the way I want in DPP and then export the images and they look awful in Photo Viewer but look fine in IE. I also use Fast Picture Viewer Pro which is profile aware and its display matches IE’s and DPP’s but not Windows Photo Viewer. They also have a plugin for displaying RAW files in Explorer and WPV on Windows 7 64-bit machines.

[Barracuda]

Everything outside of Lightroom – IE8/Chrome/Windows Viewer/My Work Machine/Coworkers Browser/Coworkers Lightroom – looks (99%) the same. Only in Lightroom to the images appear (significantly) different. I’ll dig into the Lightroom settings tonight, but this is pretty much a stock install, I haven’t tweaked anything that I can think of, but your idea that the monitor profile is getting applied twice, maybe because I have two monitors running, or something else. In any case, that’s the direction I’m going to start digging when I get home this evening. As soon as my replacement part for my laptop arrives and I successfully fix that, I may just go ahead with the upgrade.

[CauseISaidSo]

Look into the settings in Lightroom that control whether to use a color profile or not (I’ve never used LR so can’t help there). Make sure it’s set to NOT use a profile. It shouldn’t be that you have dual monitors (I do as well, with a different profile on each), but rather that the profile is applied by the video driver/OS and then applied again by LR.

[Barracuda]

Newest Video drives = fixed. Not sure if it was the drivers themselves, or just the fact that I force it to do a clean install of them, but colors now match. 🙂

[orionid]

YAY!

[Barracuda]

My split tone B&W’s thank you all for your help. Been meaning to inquire if such things were kosher in Farktopgrahy, as long as they aren’t neon green and vivid fuchsia? – this one also has a fairly significant vignette added which I’m under the assumption isn’t really kosher.

[Farktographer]

My split tone B&W’s thank you all for your help. Been meaning to inquire if such things were kosher in Farktopgrahy, as long as they aren’t neon green and vivid fuchsia? – this one also has a fairly significant vignette added which I’m under the assumption isn’t really kosher.

My personal opinion is that it’s bending the rules too far (both the vignette and splitting tones); makes for a pretty cool image, though.

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