Color Space, gamma?

[agamid]

The photos I post look washed out when viewed from PBase relative to the way they look on the screen before I send them in. Could this be a gamma or color space issue? I'm embedding Adobe RGB as the profile. I'm also using a Mac - could this be the problem?

A.J.

[realkuhl]

The photos I post look washed out when viewed from PBase relative to the way they look on the screen before I send them in. Could this be a gamma or color space issue? I'm embedding Adobe RGB as the profile. I'm also using a Mac - could this be the problem?

A.J.

I have the same problem. Can somebody explain what the optimum color space is. I actually think this is more an issue of what browser you are using instead of a problem with PBase. If you download an image that looks washed out and load it back into Photoshop, it looks great.

How do we make best looking images appear while using Internet Explorer? Hope someone can help clear this up. My daughter doesn't really look like that !

-JL

[agamid]

realkuhl,

Quite right! The downloads are better but I note that the profile has been stripped. I can make uploads look OK but need to darken them appreciably in PS. Should probably be using sRGB. Maybe I'll try that.

[agamid]

sRGB seems to be the answer. I put up a couple in that space tonight and the results look much better. -A.J.-

[jchambers]

Colourspace is an issue here.

There is a major difference between different colourspaces. Just looking at two below, you can see that while working in Adobe Colourspace, if you convert to sRGB (what is used on the internet with jpg's) you can loose quite a bit of information in the picture.

This conversion can cost your photo the dramatic range in colours you originally saw while editing. (especially in the green spectrum)

[agamid]

Yes, color space is, I believe, the issue. sRGB is a smaller color space and I believe, at this point, that PBase software assumes that all photos are in this space. I think the reason that my photos got washed out was because PBase strips color space tags (I said profile in an earlier post - I should have said color space) and browsers thus assume that the pics are is sRGB. The evidence does not suggest that PBase converts from whatever space the picture is actually in, just that the tag is not processed. Thus, unless I do something, a picture which is in whatever space (I use Adobe RGB) it will be interpreted as being in sRGB and this misinterpretation causes a quality loss. Thus I can either do nothing in which case a viewer who want's to see what I saw will have to download the picture and open it in Photoshop and assign AdobeRGB, or I can try to compress it into sRGB manually (by reducing midtone gamma) or I can convert it to sRGB in Photoshop and post it in the space PBase seems to want. Yes, I lose gamut but the vast majority of viewers are looking at it on systems which can't reproduce anything outside the sRGB space anyway. People with hi-end systems won't see what I see but then the images have been downsampled and jpeg'ed as well. Put another way, if it's going to get shoved into sRGB anyway, I might as well use an accepted compression scheme (Photo Shop's). If anyone did want to see the full quality image I could always send him a AdobeRGB .psd file. No one has requested one to date.

Of course it would be nice if PBase kept color space tags (hint, hint).

My comments are based on my empirical observations. I really have no idea how PBase handles color space incompatibilites. Anyone who can enlighten me will be answering my original question.

Cheers, A.J.