LR/PS Exporting Issue

Hi NPN massive,

Hope you can help. In the lastest update of PS/LR I have been having issues in colour and exposure shifts when exporting out of PS and LR. The images when exported to jpg, using the same colour space settings to what I edited in, are probably coming out about a 3rd of a stop darker (especially in the shadows) and a colour shift from orange towards yellow. This is viewing the same image on the same screen.

Any advice appreciated

Eugene

NOTE: I am working in the same colour space throughout my workflow and using a calibrated monitor.

A few more details would be good. You talked about color space. The default and appropriate color space in LR is Pro/Photo and hopefully you are using the same in PS. Exporting out to a jpeg (unless the jpeg is going to be used for print) should be sRGB.

In LR I’m assuming you are using the Export Dialog box.

In PS, what are you using… Save As, File/ Export/Export As…, File/Export/Export/Quick Export… ??

Are you embedding the color space in the exported image?

Hi Keith, Thanks for responding.

To answer your questions. My usual workflow involves import to LR (profoto), edit and export in sRGB using the dialog box. Usually this works with no/minimal colour shifts, etc. The same is happening if I edit in LR (profoto) and export in the same colour space.

Occasionally I open images up in PS for cloning and work to prepare images for print. I keep this in the same colour space unless I need something specific for the printers. I generally convert the profile, make any adjustments and export to jpg using the export function in PS.

I have tried using the save function in PS and this is yielding the same results.

Usually I dont embed the profile. I have tried both options to see if the results vary, but they dont.

I’d appreciate any advice :slight_smile:

Hmmm… Not sure what may be happening.

Embedding Profiles. You should always embed then profile in the image. You may be getting away with it since you are opening it again and using a default for the profile assumption. For others, with out an embedded profile there’s no “language” to define what the numbers even mean.

Can you post an original image (at least as close as you can - RAW files probably can’t be posted here due to size issues??), and post the jpeg that you are creating so we can download and look inside to see what might be going on.

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Yeah will do. The reason I dont normally embed the profile is that the printers I use don’t accept it. I’ll have another chat with them this week and see how we can move forward.

Let me see what I can do about some example images.

Hope you see these.

The first image is a snip of my screen when editing in LR

The second image is a jpg export from LR sRGB colour space. If you look at the left flank on the mountain it seems a lot more yellow than the oranges in the upper image. Blacks actaully look lighter rather than darker

The last image is edited in LR, opened in PS. Converted prophoto to sRGB and exported with embedded color profile. Colours seem lighter again

I’m not sure how to respond or help with that. If the folks you are working with actually said they won’t accept images with profiles embedded, my first suggestion would be to find different printers. That makes absolutely no sense at all. Embedding the profile specifies what “language” all of the numbers mean in the file for colors. Without that information it’s a bit like asking someone to translate a sentence, but not telling them what language it is in the first place.

I honestly see very little difference in the screen shots you posted. Maybe some minor variances, but hard to tell. I’m still suspicious on color space. I’m attaching a screen shot of color settings in PS that should be set so you know when/if there are color space discrepancies. Maybe you already have this??

As noted before, I use ProPhoto. So you’ll see my working colorspace set to that. Note the check boxes on what to do is there is a missing or mismatched profile. A dialog box will appear to validate what you want to do about it.

It would still be helpful here to have a downloadable file to see what is in it. With screen shots, that information is not accessible.

I don’t blame you for being suspicious about the imbedding. I was too. Their reason seems to be along the lines of it screwing with their print profiles when it comes to producing the image. To be honest, I’ve had a bit of a nightmare with printers in the UK and have struggled to find find ones who will reproduce with sufficient quality and on the medium I want to sell. I have control over smaller prints (up to A2) where I now have access to print and manage them myself. It’s got to the point where I’m not offering metal and acrylic prints at the moment as I can’t get the quality I want.

I’m just away at the moment but will send some downloadable copies of every image/test I made when I get back later in the week.

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Embedded image profiles and Printer (ICC) profiles are two completely separate entities. Printer profiles job in life is to correct the discrepancies between what a printer / paper combination prints on the paper, versus the RGB values for the pixels in the image file. I’m still mystified why they would be telling you to not embed an image profile. I’m sorry to say, but it doesn’t appear that they understand color management and all of the components.

Can we upload TIF files here? I can’t remember. High Res. JPEG’s should be OK with sRGB though.

JPEG’s with embedded profiles are fine to analyze the problem. Other bringing in the original RAW file, and exporting I don’t see a way to help resolve the issue.

Keith. Apologies for the delay in getting back to you with this. I’ve been silly busy. Under lockdown so things are nice and chilled.

For the sake of consistency I changed my ProPhoto settings to match yours. I have exported the original, with no edits and various edits in colour spaces as outlined below. Hope these will help you investigate what you mentioned - all metadata included

Original no edits (same crop) - LR export in sRGB

Edited version - LR export in sRGB (definate shift to orange)

Edited version - LR export in ProPhoto (this is the closest to what I see in LR for the final edit)

Edited version - PS export ProPhoto (lighter than the ProPhoto export from LR)

Edited version - PS export sRGB (lighter yellows again imo)

Unfortunately, looks like the files in this category (Discussions) are not downloadable. So to test it as good as possible, I clicked on each image and did a screen capture of the image. At least that way I know the colors posted will be the same as presented on the screen.

I took those four screen captures, loaded them into Photoshop as Layers. I then aligned them to take care of any minor differences based on my screen captures. Here is the resulting Layer stack

Note in this .screen shot that the bottom two layers are currently not visible with the eyeball icon turned off.

Now I change the top layer blending mode to Difference. That will show any differences between that top layer (PS - SRGB) and the layer below it (LR - SRGB).

Here is the result:

You see the top layer blend mode is difference and the resulting image on screen is completely black. The tiny white line at the top is simply a result of alignment of the two layers based on my screen capture. The completely black image says there is NO DIFFERENCE between the PS - SRGB image the LR-SRGB Image.

To avoid this reply being too long, I did the same thing with different pairs of layers. I won’t post screen captures of every result because they look just like this one.

Compared the two ProPhoto images - Same Result - NO DIFFERENCE

Compared the the two LR Images - Same Result - NO DIFFERENCE

Compared the two PS Images - Same Result - NO DIFFERENCE.

So… my conclusion is that all four images are the same.

If you want to try the same thing with the exported images that you have rather than introducing the step that I had to do with screen captures, I’m guessing you are going to see the same result.

Try it, and post the results here.

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Thanks again Keith. For the last few days I have been trying what you suggested and taking the pairs of layers and looking at the differences between the files. Using this method I can’t tell any variations between them. My eyes must be playing tricks on me.

I am however still seeing a difference between what I see on my editing screen (LR/PS) and how the export looks. I’m not sure if this was the best way of demonstrating it, but I took a screenshot (sRGB monitor) and the PS export in sRGB. Using the method described I have aligned and used masks to show the difference between the two. It gives me this result:

Im sure this was probaly not the best way of testing it (screen shot and exorted image). I am going to try your method out with a few other images and see how I get on.

Thanks again for all your help and input into this issue. Also apologies for my slow replies. I’ve just been a bit busy recently.

Cheers,
Eugene

You introduced a problem doing that. Your monitor is NOT sRGB. Your monitor has a color profile associated with it and it is not just a straight sRGB profile. It doesn’t matter if you’re running Windows or Mac, you have a monitor profile even if you haven’t color calibrated. So you are now comparing an exported image from PS sRGB with a screen shot that is a different color space.

Do the following steps:

  1. pick an image
  2. Export it from LR using the export dialog box - make sure the color space is sRGB, pick some size for the long edge
  3. Open the same image in Photoshop - Export it There are many ways to export in PS. Try using Export, Save for Web Legacy. Make sure you check convert to sRGB, and Embed Color Profile and at the bottom right, set the long edge to the same size as you used in the LR export.
  4. Open those two exported jpegs in PS
  5. get them in the same document as layers
  6. Set the blending mode of the top layer to Difference
    I’ll bet you the screen is black.

I just did that with several images and the result is always the same. You just can’t do a test and introduce problems that will introduce a difference. In my post about using this Difference comparison, all images were screen captures because I couldn’t download the files. They were screen captures of your exports which all proved to be the same.

Added response: You can also prove to yourself that you introduced the problem by doing your comparison with two different profiles, by doing this:

With your screen shot go to the Edit Menu, Choose Convert to Profile and convert your screen shot to sRGB. Then stack and do a difference and you’ll see they are identical. (in that convert dialog you’ll also see your screen shot was NOT sRGB)

Here’s a screen shot of the “Convert to Profile” dialog box when you have an image that was a screen grab. It shows the screen grab profile is NOT sRGB, and the settings to convert it to sRGB.

If you set your color settings as I have mine above in this thread, you would know the profile doesn’t match because when you open an image it will prompt you for how you want to deal with a profile mismatch between the image you are trying to open your default working color space.

I have been through the method you suggest and agree the screen in black. I have done the test on both the sRGB and Prophoto versions. Example below:

I did suspect that there may have been an issue between comparing a screenshot and the sRGB version of the export, but didn’t consider the methodology. I do have the mismacth warning set for when I open images (have for a long time). When I open the screenshot it prompts me that there is a mismatch and do I want to convert to sRGB. If I do that and compare difference, there is a mismatch.

The dialog box you showed says there is a missing profile.

“The document SNIP.JPG does not have an embedded profile”.

Since there is no profile it is trying to assign one. Who knows what colors you’ll get doing that. Assigning a profile and Converting a profile are not the same thing.

It is very much like me asking you to convert a group of characters into an English sentence, but I’m not going to tell you what language the original sentence is in.

A file without an embedded profile is just a bunch of numbers but nobody knows (and photoshop doesn’t know either) what language the numbers represent.

I’m not surprised that if you assigned it an sRGB profile that you’d end up seeing a difference. Who knows what colors you got.

Yeah when converted they looked similar but showed a difference. Thanks again for all your input :slight_smile: