# Colourspace problems



## Overread (Nov 12, 2014)

Sooo yeah colourspaces

For some reason when I'm opening photos I've edited in Lightroom 5 then saved in Photoshop CS5 the photos have an odd colourspace setup. They appear to have a normal sRGB for when I put them on the net and when I view them in windows image viewer  - BUT if I set the windows picture viewer to slide-shop it appears to drop the colour space and all the colour and saturation gets lost.

I know I'm doing something basic wrong but I can't work out what it is since my Photoshop colourspace is already set to sRGB (or rather that really long term that's used for it)

IMG_4689 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

is one of the photos doing it.


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## Forkie (Nov 14, 2014)

I don't know where I saw it and I could be wrong, but I've read somewhere that Windows Picture Viewer is simply not colour managed and to avoid looking at photos with it whenever possible.  I don't know what rendering it uses as it must use some software to show the image but whatever it is, seems not to pay any attention to colourspace.  Which begs the question, what is the point of it, really*?




*I also start to wonder about the point of Windows full stop, these days!


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## runnah (Nov 14, 2014)

Yup. A lot of microsoft office products are like "colorspace? WTF is that? Lets just ignore it!".


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## Overread (Nov 14, 2014)

What I don't get is:
1) This is only happening now that I've started using CS5 and lightroom - but I'm still outputting in sRGB because I upload to the net.

2) It only happens in windows picture viewer slideshow (actually it also happens in Neat Image when I use that plug-in to remove noise - however there its a lesser issue since I'm removing noise not worried about colour so being colourspace aware likely isn't all that important).


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## Alexr25 (Nov 14, 2014)

I had a similar problem with Windows Photo Viewer but in my case it displayed the images too dark. The problem turns out to be with how WPV deals with monitor profiles.
These days most applications that are colour profile aware use ICC Version 4 format for the colour profile information, WPV being a Microsoft product and hence disregarding industry standards, only works with ICC Version 2 colour profiles.
The solution is to ether ditch WPV (probable the best solution as its a horrible piece of software) or to make sure that your monitor profiler software writes the ICC file in V2 format.

Take a look here for some background on ICC V2/V4.


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## Alexr25 (Nov 14, 2014)

I just found this site which describes your problem and gives a bit more information on ICC V2/V4 pros and cons.


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