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Oversaturation in sRGB

biglouis

Well-known member
There is something which has been bugging me for a long time now - although I'm embarassed that it might make me appear a complete noob.

I post process my RAW files and film scans in LR and CS3. In LR I am working in ProPhotoRGB - if I further process in CS3 I work in AdobeRGB.

When I export to jpg in LR or save as jpg in CS3 then the finished image is always oversaturated. For example, a nice duck-egg blue sky become more cyan than blue. Reds also seem to be boosted.

I've come to the conclusion that this is the result of converting from tiff to jpeg, or RAW to jpeg.

As I understand it, jpeg does not have the same colour space as a tiff (am I correct)? Or am I missing a trick? I would dearly like my RAW processed or TIFF files that are converted to jpg to have the same saturation and colouration as what I see on my screen in LR or CS3.

About the only way I have been able to preserve the same colouration in jpeg is to untick the colour profile box when I save in CS3 so that in effect there is no colour profile information (which can't be true, can it?).

Thanks for any obvious pointers.

LouisB
 

Shashin

Well-known member
The color space is not dependent on the file type. However, the program may be making a default conversion to sRGB, especially if you are going through a process to size for the web--unfortunately the web is really not color managed and so we are kind of stuck with sRGB.

If you don't embed the color profile, then there is no metadata allowing output devices to understand the color space and they might go to a default and the image will look strange. The color space simply defines the color of the pixels, but if you assign the right color space to the image, then the color will be fine, but you need to manually assign the right color space. RGB values don't actually refer to a specific color outside a specific color space. RGB values are simply coordinates of a particular color space.

Conversions to sRGB suck. Usually a perceptual conversion is the best compromise, but you are going to get a different image especially if you have saturated colors.

Why do you use jpg?
 
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