# Why your pictures look like crap.



## SensePhoto (Apr 16, 2011)

Am I the only one that is somewhat happy with their picture and then when it's being viewed on a different monitor it looks all pixilated and flat?

I use my 27" iMac at home to do my editing, when Im done with a file I export it to the hard drive and upload it online without messing with its size which results in 15-25mb per file uploaded. 

I come to work where we have maybe 3-4 years old Dell monitors and my picture doesnt look sharp anymore, the lines are skewed and its just plain grey and unfun....while other images I see here on the same monitor are still mesmerizing....what do you recommend doing about that? I heard something about converting images to 16 or 8 bit but i dont want to do anything to jeopardize the integrity of the shot. 

Example:


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## mikehaugen (Apr 16, 2011)

I would recommend resizing and maybe flattening them and saving them separately as a "for web" version.  Most people aren't expecting the highest quality photos from the internet, but you would still have the larger files if you ever wanted to print them.  This is of course assuming that you are uploading them for the web and not for some kind of archiving.


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## LarissaPhotography (Apr 16, 2011)

I know when we post images online, we've occasionally gotten complaints about the images only to find out that it was all their monitor.  It would be nice if everyone had amazing equipment when they viewed our images.


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## mikehaugen (Apr 16, 2011)

This may be a stupid question but has anyone noticed if different browsers display images differently?


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## Bitter Jeweler (Apr 16, 2011)

Yes, not all browsers are colorspace aware.


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## usayit (Apr 16, 2011)

What online service are you posting to?

Some will compress the incoming images to save space thus munging up the details.


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## SensePhoto (Apr 16, 2011)

usayit said:


> What online service are you posting to?
> 
> Some will compress the incoming images to save space thus munging up the details.



Photobucket.....


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## RONDAL (Apr 16, 2011)

photobucket = poo


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## The_Traveler (Apr 16, 2011)

Holy crap
It's you who are sabotaging your images.
Hosting a multi-layer, multi-megabyte psd and expecting it to display well on the web is crazy, wrong and totally wasteful of time and disk space.
You should be editing in a wide color space like adobe RGB for best printing but converting to sRGB for display on the web.
Never, ever  expect the hosting servers to reduce to viewing size and resharpen.
Host at the size you will display.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to do some reading.

AND if you put good pictures, well prepared, sized and corrected on Photobucket, they will look great.
I will match my pictures on there for faithful color and detail with anyone's.


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## ronda (Apr 16, 2011)

Are you shooting Raw or Jpeg? What software are you using? What is your editing workflow?


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## Derrel (Apr 16, 2011)

Assign an sRGB profile to the images so that the multiple "dumb" and "colorblind" web browsers for Windoze will know how to display the image. Since you are probably editing in AdobeRGB, and sRGB images tend to look flat and ugly, you might also consider adding around 12 to 15% saturation to images destined to be seen on Windoze boxes displaying images in sRGB color space on dumb browsers. As far as sending larger images of 15 to 25 megabytes to a storage site, and allowing the site to down-sample the images---go back up to The Traveler's post, #9, for your dose of excoriation and shaming.


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## SensePhoto (Apr 17, 2011)

ronda said:


> Are you shooting Raw or Jpeg? What software are you using? What is your editing workflow?


 
Shooting RAW, using lightroom 3,  as far as workflow the example in the first post is HDR so what i do is a desaturate the exposure images just a bit and add a bit of sharpness before exporting them to photomatix or Efex Pro, after i do the tone mapping the image is automatically imported back to lightroom where i use selective saturation levels to make the image look the way i want it. I use that workflow most of the time and open to suggestions.


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## SensePhoto (Apr 17, 2011)

The_Traveler said:


> Holy crap
> It's you who are sabotaging your images.
> Hosting a multi-layer, multi-megabyte psd and expecting it to display well on the web is crazy, wrong and totally wasteful of time and disk space.
> You should be editing in a wide color space like adobe RGB for best printing but converting to sRGB for display on the web.
> ...


 
Here's a screenshot of setting that my files are being exported by default....looks like its already set to sRGB. (great picture btw)

Do you guys save your final images as TiFF extension or JPEG?


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## SensePhoto (Apr 17, 2011)

Same picture but with the following setting






Hard to say if it helped at all but it went from being 16mb to 1.8mb


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## The_Traveler (Apr 17, 2011)

Quality setting is way off.
Since screen is medium quality at best, export at 60 quality or less for viewing on the screen.
Make long edge 1000 pixels
There is a plugin on Jeff Friedl's site that will automatically export at different qualities so you can pick the lowest quality with good resolution. 

Lew


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## KmH (Apr 17, 2011)

In Lightroom you are looking at the image in a color space (ProPhoto RGB)  that has a much broader gamut than sRGB has.


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## The_Traveler (Apr 17, 2011)

Here is a 160 KB version of your house. IMO, marginal difference, if any, in quality but 1/10 the size of your smaller image and 1/100 the original.


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## Rekd (Apr 17, 2011)

LarissaPhotography said:


> It would be nice if everyone had amazing equipment when they viewed our images.


 
That would be nice but ain't gonna happen. But don't let that deter you from striving to take photos so good it won't matter what they're viewed on. I mean, it's just like trying to take pictures that everyone will like; ain't gonna happen, but we all try. :thumbup:


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## Drake (Apr 17, 2011)

The_Traveler said:


> Here is a 160 KB version of your house. IMO, marginal difference, if any, in quality but 1/10 the size of your smaller image and 1/100 the original.


Marginal difference, _if any_, in quality?
I'd check again. The quality is terrible, with jpeg compression artifacts all over the place. From my experience the lowest acceptable jpeg quality is 60, with a pretty small output size while still showing some more or less visible blemishes. I find 80 to be a safe amount in most cases for internet distribution.


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## The_Traveler (Apr 17, 2011)

Rather than just having a blanket opinion, why not just post a series of images at various compressions so people can make the evaluation themselves?


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## SensePhoto (Apr 17, 2011)

KmH said:


> In Lightroom you are looking at the image in a color space (ProPhoto RGB)  that has a much broader gamut than sRGB has.


 
I was wondering about that setting, thanks for posting this Keith


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## SensePhoto (Apr 17, 2011)

Drake said:


> The_Traveler said:
> 
> 
> > Here is a 160 KB version of your house. IMO, marginal difference, if any, in quality but 1/10 the size of your smaller image and 1/100 the original.
> ...


 
I'll have to agree with Drake here, im looking at that image from iPad 2, my iMac and a 2yr old HP laptop and on all of them it looks pretty bad.

Now by summing all your feedback up so far this is what i came up with below. Long edge 1000 pixels on all 3, quality set on 80 on all three....now the difference between all 3 is the color profile...1) ProPhoto RGB 2) sRGB 3) Adobe RGB 1998. The weirdest thing they all looked about the same exported on my hardrive, as soon as i uploaded them they started changing hue...

1)
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




2)
	

	
	
		
		

		
		
	


	




3)


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## SensePhoto (Apr 17, 2011)

Spent the past 2 hrs reading about color profiles. From now on i'll be taking pictures in RAW as I used to of course but in Adobe RGB and use ProPhoto RGB in my work flow until im ready to save the final project as a JPEG sRGB. This way i have bigger color range to work with and all color is preserved in my original. I know that there are many people that say other wise after reading all explanations this make more sense to me. As far as saving images looks like 90% quality 1000 pixels long edge will work just fine.

Thank you guys for all your help, you rock!


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## shufti (Apr 17, 2011)

Colldfire said:


> Do you guys save your final images as TiFF extension or JPEG?



When i've developed my raw i save a tif and a jpg.


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## Drake (Apr 17, 2011)

The_Traveler said:


> Rather than just having a blanket opinion, why not just post a series of images at various compressions so people can make the evaluation themselves?


What for? Just look at the image in the first post and the one you have saved. The one with a heavy compression is just unpleasant to look at, with many distracting jpeg artifacts. Look at the treetops where the difference is post apparent. What about the sky? Visible pixel blocks. Then there's the roof. And the grass in the bottom without the fine details. And overall, the image just isn't very sharp. Why invest in quality glass just to post images looking as if they were taken with an old camera phone? Even the newer camera phones can do better.


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## Garbz (Apr 19, 2011)

Ok I think you're getting ahead of yourself here. Firstly a few things to note:

If you shoot in RAW and edit in Lightroom the colour space you are "working" in is irrelevant. Lightroom uses an internal colourspace called MelissaRGB until the point at which you hit the export button, or the open in Photoshop button. At that point it is converted to what you set it to. If you're working in Lightroom you should ignore the issue, and when you save an image to be uploaded to the internet save it as sRGB. Additionally one thing to note is that Lightroom is aware of the colour space of your monitor. This means that it converts colours to what it thinks looks right. Most web browsers are not aware of the colour space of your monitor which can lead you to have 2 100% identical files, in an identical colour space looking different in your browser compared to Lightroom. If you have a calibrated monitor, trust Lightroom only.

Ok secondly the display gamut of the 27" iMac is sRGB. This means in a colour managed setup you should see absolutely no difference between the various settings as your display is the lowest common denominator. Incidentally this is also why I advocate that people who have sRGB monitors who don't go off and get fancy prints done, don't work in wide gamuts as you suffer through extra hassles for no gain. Anyway the point is if you see a difference at all between your images you're doing something wrong in the conversion. ... You are converting aren't you, and not just assigning profiles right?

For your information, but not for your consideration you can check your browser's ICC support here: Is your system ICC Version 4 ready? If you support ICCv2 profiles you're pretty good to go. This doesn't change a thing though because the other 99.999% of the internet does not support it, and thus you should still only ever use sRGB to display images on the internet. Again this does not imply that your browser is aware of the colour space of your monitor. The only one I am aware which does this is firefox and that needs to be manually set in gfx.color_management.display_profile in about:config.


So your answer to the above 3 pictures changing hue. Do this experiment:
1. Copy the ProPhoto Image from your browser.
2. Create a new sRGB image in photoshop
3. Paste into this sRGB image, you should still have a green hue.
4. Click edit -> assign profile -> ProPhoto. 

Looks as intended right? Maybe not:
1. Copy the bottom sRGB image from your browser
2. Create a new sRGB image in Photoshop
3. Paste the image into Photoshop
4. Compare side by side.

Now you should see that the sRGB and the ProPhoto images actually look identical Hue and saturation wise. However the sRGB image is far higher quality, it doesn't have horrendous banding in the shadows. 

What you have done is uploaded a ProPhoto RGB image on the internet, and either failed to embed the ProPhotoRGB ICC profile when saving, or viewed it using a non-colour aware browser. In this case you did the former meaning no matter how much colour awareness your software has it would need to guess at what the profile of the image was. This is the biggest no-no you can do. Never EVER upload an image without an ICC profile embedded unless it's an sRGB image.

The other thing you have done is caused the quality of your image to suffer by playing around with the colours in an 8bit space. Colour conversion is a lossy process just like converting a 16bit image to an 8bit image. That ProPhotoRGB image you saved above, despite being saved in a high quality, and despite the ICC profile missing being forgivable (you can add it afterwards) can never be as high a quality as the sRGB image because you don't have enough bits per pixel to display the wide colour gamut. So in the end there was a lot of screwing around, colour headaches, the results were unpredictable when viewed, when fixed the quality was lower than the sRGB image, and all in all you spent extra time for a lower quality product.

And the final kick in the balls is that I am viewing these pictures on a monitor that covers 97% of the AdobeRGB gamut, and since even on my screen the ProPhoto image and the sRGB image look identical hue and saturation wise, it means that the photo you took was never actually colourful enough to gain a benefit from a wider colour space to begin with.


AdobeRGB is a wonderful thing,
If you're making prints,
Of sunsets or oversaturated flowers with polarising filters,
And you never save the image as a JPEG, 
And never display the image on the web,
And never convert it below 16bit,
And make sure the person printing it is competent to give the same care. 

Then it is good. Don't just blindly follow all the pretty numbers and CIE diagrams showing how big a colour space is.


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## manaheim (Apr 19, 2011)

This is pretty amusing.


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