Pix.ie Only De-Saturation Now????

Ballyman

Hopefully someone here can help me.

I was PP'ing a portrait and when I exported the .CR2 to my computer as a jpeg from LR the colours were exactly as I wanted them to be. My monitor is calibrated also by the way.

I uploaded the photo to pix.ie but when I opened it there the colours were severly de-saturated and it was flat and dull looking. I tried it in Flickr also to check it wasn't a pix.ie issue but it's the same scenario when I upload it there. I opened the photo in both LR, Photoshop and Windows Photo Gallery and it looks perfect in all of these, well maybe not perfect but as I wanted it to look

ANyone have any idea why it de-saturates when uploaded to flickr/pix??

One last thing, I just cjecked LR and I exported the photo as sRGB. Would this have any difference? Whats the difference between this, AdobeRGB and ProPhoto RGB?? And which one should I use for printing and which for the web?

Cheers for the help.

Nisio

There was talk recently that web browsers weren't managing colours well, might it be the way the browser is displaying the pic? Is the problem still there if you open the file on your hard drive using a browser?

nilhg

The only reason I can think of is that it's not in sRGB, which is the default for web use, you could try turning on colour management in Firefox and see if that makes any difference.

AnimalRights

There was a thread on this b4 which me and someone else commented on.
If I use DPP and I export to my HD the colours are exactly how I pp'd 'em.
If I use LR the strong colours I have always fade and look too bright!
I have come to the conclusion that LR is too blame.
What I do now is just guess, ie add more black fill/contrast etc to allow for the brightness/dull effect result.

whyulittle

Another thing is that the preview (500) version doesn't display the same as the full size photo. Photo below is a good example.

achtungbarry

I usually make a seperate file for upload usually a maximum of 800 pixels on its longest side.

My very last step before saving is to go to edit then convert to profile and click on sRGB even if I have exported in sRGB.

This solved the faded colours on flickr problem for me.

Let me know if this works for you. Should do.

Hugh_C

I think it's the software that's used for making the different sizes.

Say you upload something that's 3000x2000 - both pix.ie and flickr have to generate a bunch of different sizes, not sure what they use to do that but my website uses inbuilt functions called phpThumb and/or ImageMagick's "convert" program. I think they're a bit cheap and nasty because I notice colour differences between versions of an image on my website too.

Here's a little test. The image on the left is uploaded straight from LightRoom at 240x240 to my website and the image on the right is a version hosted on flickr and scaled by their software. Only difference I'm seeing is sharpening...

???

Ballyman

Nisio wrote: »

There was talk recently that web browsers weren't managing colours well, might it be the way the browser is displaying the pic? Is the problem still there if you open the file on your hard drive using a browser?

Yep. I opened it in both firefox and IE and it's dull in both.

Ballyman

achtungbarry wrote: »

I usually make a seperate file for upload usually a maximum of 800 pixels on its longest side.

My very last step before saving is to go to edit then convert to profile and click on sRGB even if I have exported in sRGB.

This solved the faded colours on flickr problem for me.

Let me know if this works for you. Should do.

Can you explain this a little more to me as I can't find convert to profile in LR under Edit???

Hugh_C

Ballyman wrote: »

Can you explain this a little more to me as I can't find convert to profile in LR under Edit???

It's in the Export menu (but may be elsewhere too)

achtungbarry

Ballyman wrote: »

Can you explain this a little more to me as I can't find convert to profile in LR under Edit???

Sorry, this is in photoshop not lightroom.

I do this after I have exported the photo from LR to photoshop and tidied up the image.

As I say, it is my final step in the editing workflow.

oshead

What colour profiles are you using in Photoshop? IE uses sRGB, Lightroom uses ProPhoto RGB by default. In photoshop you could check the profile and choose Proof Colors from the view menu. For printing it is mostly recommended to use Adobe RGB 1998. I would suggest to find out what colour profiles your printing company is using and then pp your images using them.

One thing to remember though. Just because your monitor is calibrated, this has no infulience on printing of the image. You can request from your printing company, a test calibration image which they will send to you for free. You can manually calibrate your monitor with that and the downloaded colour profile supplied by them.

Hope this helps.
Dave OS

AnimalRights

How comes this doesn't effect DPP?

Nisio

Ballyman wrote: »

Yep. I opened it in both firefox and IE and it's dull in both.

so a copy of the picture opened in windows picture viewer is fine but the same file opened in a browser is dull? That would take flikr and pix out of the "frame" and point towards the browser?

nilhg

Ballyman wrote: »

Yep. I opened it in both firefox and IE and it's dull in both.

You need to enable colour management in Firefox, I don't think IE supports it.

Test page here

Ballyman

nilhg wrote: »

You need to enable colour management in Firefox, I don't think IE supports it.

Test page here

Good man John. Working perfectly now. Cheers.

oshead

Ballyman wrote: »

Good man John. Working perfectly now. Cheers.

How are they looking in IE?

Marcus

Hi guys,

I thought I'd jump in here and give a little explanation. I can't speak for Flickr, but I wrote the image processing algorithms being used by Pixie so I know them all too well .

Firstly, Pixie doesn't support CYMK, HughC has posted about this in the past and we investigated and concluded it was going to be a lot of work to enable this support and since so very few people required it, we decided not to work on it. Can you check that you are using sRGB?

Secondly, when you upload an image to Pixie we resize the original to 8 or so different sizes. We implemented a custom algorithm based on an 8x8 convolution matrix to perform the scaling which in our tests provided the highest quality and lowest loss of detail while retaining as close as possible to the original image contrast. The only problem was that the scaling process introduced blur which need to be undone by sharpening. We use an unsharp mask technique with dynamically calculated parameters based on the original size together with the degree of reduction being performed. All image sizes are scaled from the original, not from the next size up and this also add to overall image quality.

It is possible that colours can get very slightly distorted due to the scaling process. Remember, if you shrink 32 pixels into 1 pixel, you are effectively merging the colours and while the algorithm does it's best to keep as close as possible to the original, a single dark pixel in the 32 can have the effect of 1/32 colour difference in the final. There are also rounding errors to take into account.

Hugh I'd be interested in seeing the Pixie version of the girl with red hair...:) (just for my own curiosity )

Whyulittle, I'm looking at your sunset image below, but I'm on my laptop and can't quite see what the issue is on this monitor. Can you let me know what you think is wrong?

Marcus

Marcus

Ballyman wrote: »

Good man John. Working perfectly now. Cheers.

Just saw this thread had a second page

Glad you got to the bottom of it.

Ballyman

I got ahead of myself a little there. It works in Flickr fine now but Pix.ie is still the same, de-saturated and duller. I've attached the two photos below.

The first one is Flickr and the second is Pix.ie. There is a marked difference. Why is that I wonder?

Marcus

Ballyman wrote: »

I got ahead of myself a little there. It works in Flickr fine now but Pix.ie is still the same, de-saturated and duller. I've attached the two photos below.

The first one is Flickr and the second is Pix.ie. There is a marked difference. Why is that I wonder?

It's difficult for me to see the difference on my laptop. I do notice the Pixie version is slightly lighter. I also notice the the Pixie version of the 500px size is using a higher compression that Flickr. We could change this if it makes a big difference, but I'm not sure that would account for the de-saturation you are seeing. Is it desaturation or brightness? Is there a testcard we could use to tell the difference?

Ballyman

I just checked this post in IE and Firefox. In firefox there is a very noticeable difference between the two photos when you open this thread but in IE there is little or no difference between the two photos when you open this thread.

Does Pix.ie work differently with IE than Firefox?

Marcus

Ballyman wrote: »

I just checked this post in IE and Firefox. In firefox there is a very noticeable difference between the two photos when you open this thread but in IE there is little or no difference between the two photos when you open this thread.

Does Pix.ie work differently with IE than Firefox?

I'm using Firefox here and the difference is negligible. I've also tried IE, Chrome, Opera and Safari all the same. Perhaps it's my laptop.

Pixie serves HTML and images, it works the same in all browsers. The Flickr image be retaining the colour profile in the resized version. To my knowledge I don't think we do...and this missing colour profile might be causing the issue.

whyulittle

iampixie wrote: »

Whyulittle, I'm looking at your sunset image below, but I'm on my laptop and can't quite see what the issue is on this monitor. Can you let me know what you think is wrong?

Marcus

The sky is red in the large version, and orange in the small version, (EDIT) in Safari.

They look closer in Firefox.

challengemaster

There's definatly a big problem with your laptop if you can't see the difference in those portraits Marcus... It's FAR from negligible

Marcus

challengemaster wrote: »

There's definatly a big problem with your laptop if you can't see the difference in those portraits Marcus... It's FAR from negligible

I'll check it out when I get into the office in the morning. We have Lacie calibrated monitors there.

I still think the problem is missing color profiles in the resized images. Can you confirm the original full sized image (as displayed in your browser) is okay and the problem is only happening on resized images?

AnimalRights

No one answered my earlier query why I only get the faded/brighter image after it leaves LR but not when it leaves Canon's DPP?

Marcus

AnimalRights wrote: »

No one answered my earlier query why I only get the faded/brighter image after it leaves LR but not when it leaves Canon's DPP?

I don't know the answer to that Janer

nilhg

Aindréas

It seems from the exif data on flickr that the shot there is in aRGB (click more properties and scroll to the bottom), I opened this thread in Chrome and both pics look almost exactly the same, ie like the pix version in Firefox, which would suggest that colour space is indeed the problem, it might be no harm to check the properties of the original file you uploaded on your own computer, the exported from LR or PS version.

quilmore

I've tried the portraits on 3 different browsers and could see them very close to each other, sorry challengemaster
my S-IPS panel is callibrated with a spyder2
and I have the same issue
same picture, hosted on my own site (no compression or any kind of processing) looks more vibrant in photoshop, acdsee, windows preview, picasa or whatever you can think of than it does when viewed in a browser (any)
I'm still puzzled about it
all my pictures are RGB (color space sRGB)

Ballyman

I export everything from LR normally to flickr/pixie and there is never any problem. However this time I used PS to process the image and then imported it into LR for final adjustments. This is the first time I have had any issues with flickr/pixie so I'm presuming it was something I did exporting from PS that caused this.

It's definitely colour space/profiling that seems to be the problem here as it worked fine after updating the colour space in Firefox. I'll have to make sure that I export everything from everywhere in sRGB and hopefully that will sort it out.

nilhg

It gets stranger, if I look at your pix page
http://pix.ie/ballyman/photos
version -2 looks like the flickr version and -1 and -3 look washed out slightly.

Have to say I'm confused.

Ballyman

Don't worry about that. Version 2 only looks like that because I increased the saturation to try and get it looking like what I was expecting!!

Version 1 is sRGB and version 3 is AdobeRGB. Disregard version 2!!!

Mr Quiet

Ballyman wrote: »

I got ahead of myself a little there. It works in Flickr fine now but Pix.ie is still the same, de-saturated and duller. I've attached the two photos below.

The first one is Flickr and the second is Pix.ie. There is a marked difference. Why is that I wonder?

On IE7, Opera 9.6 , Firefox and Chrome the difference is the same, more or less.

Picture 2 Is Brighter/Lighter/Less makeup/She looks poorly in the second and more healthy in the first

Is there an ICC fix for other browsers?

nilhg

Ballyman wrote: »

Don't worry about that. Version 2 only looks like that because I increased the saturation to try and get it looking like what I was expecting!!

Version 1 is sRGB and version 3 is AdobeRGB. Disregard version 2!!!

Stranger again, look at the full size versions on Pix (both of them), they look exactly the same as the flickr version (with colour management in firefox) but the resized ones are washed out.

Marcus

nilhg wrote: »

Stranger again, look at the full size versions on Pix (both of them), they look exactly the same as the flickr version (with colour management in firefox) but the resized ones are washed out.

This is explained by the fact that the embedded colour profiles are missing in the resized images. This makes sense. The question is why are the colour profile necessary for the resized images if they are all sRGB...?

Marcus

What can you do... :P



I'll try again to look at it on the calibrated monitor later...

Ballyman

Sorry!!

It's back again now.

Marcus

Ballyman wrote: »

Sorry!!

It's back again now.

Not for me.... still missing.

Ballyman

Refresh your cache or other such technical jargon maybe?? It's definitely back.

Marcus

Ballyman wrote: »

Refresh your cache or other such technical jargon maybe?? It's definitely back.

It's a bit more complex than that - Like Pixie, the Flickr server that serves static images for my IP address may be different than the server which is responsible for serving content to your IP address. (We have lots of servers all doing the same thing in order to handle the load). Part of their infrastructure must be down...

Ballyman

okey doke. If you go to my flickr page through the lnk below can you see it??

Marcus

Ooops... wrong place to post!

Covey

Are you a VIP now Marcus ? :pac::D

Marcus

Covey wrote: »

Are you a VIP now Marcus ? :pac::D

Wasn't I always? :pac::D

Ballyman

DId you manage to figure out what the issue with this problem on pixie was?

Marcus

Ballyman wrote: »

DId you manage to figure out what the issue with this problem on pixie was?

Your photo is still unavailable... did you delete it?

Ricky91t

I can see the image,And after looking at them for a while can see no difference!

I don't see what Challengemaster sees?Whatever they are

And i don't understand if calibration will make a difference as both the pictures will be the same for my un calibrated monitors

Marcus

Ahhhh!!!! I can see the image on Page 2, but not where I was looking on Page 3 of this thread. VERY Wierd!
Heading out now, so won't be able to look at it today...

Ballyman

Ricky91t wrote: »

I can see the image,And after looking at them for a while can see no difference!

The difference is drastic if you have the correct coluor space enabled in firefox.

Ricky91t

Just set it up manually and wow,that the scary difference,The bottom image is so flat and dull