A little help with camera raw please

[arsenal_emyrates]

just want to say that i am new to this and not experienced or anything...i am going to a lot of frustration with my camera raw editor ... i use the editor in photoshop cs 5 ...ok,so i have my .dng file ,the raw shot of my camera ,i edit that in camera raw ,i make it look amazing ,i just love the look in the editor's preview window..so then i prepare to save it as a .jpeg strait from this window ...i do that but as a .jpeg it just looses it's pop ,seems to me like the white balance it's not the same ,and some of the vibrance is gone ,it just doesn't have that glow anymore ...any ideas ? what should i do to make it look exactly the same .... there are other pictures that might seem the same when saved as a .jpeg but in the majority of cases is encounter this problem ,i tried changing the output settings ,it's useless ...and i go trough so much frustration ...

i see that it looks better when i printed the screen with the photo in the editor and it keeps that glow ,that worm feeling ,so it's clear to me that some information is lost along the way during the conversion
ok,i might be talking nonesense to you guys ,as is said i am new to all of this ,i am taking some online training courses in photoshop and maybe i will find my answers along the way but it would be nice if some one could enlighten me now

[amoringello]

Most likely is a color space and profile issue... AdobeRGB v.s. sRGB.

You're probably going to have to do some digging around to find the settings but you need to know what color space your DNG is loading in with. It doesn't really affect RAW files, but it will affect the defaults for saving.

1) How are you saving the file?
2) How are you viewing the file.

1) Saving file,
If you're using Save For Web And Devices, for some reason I have lots of problems with it messing up the color profile.

I would suggest enforcing the color profile by going to Edit... Convert to profile, and select sRGB. (Do not use Assign Profile, right next to it. This will almost certainly mess things up.) Do this just before Saving.

Save as JPEG. (naturally) :-)

2) Viewing file,
If you're using MSIE, you're likely going to have problems with anything but the most basic sRGB profile. In other words, if you were saving your JPEGs in AdobeRGB or other profile, your images may look flat or be completely messed up.
Converting to sRGB will help MSIE properly view your image.
Or you can use a better browser such as FireFox or Safari which both properly handle color profiles.


Don't feel bad... I spent months trying to get some images to look right.
In four different programs, the same image file had four different appearances!!!
It turned out that Photoshop (or perhaps me, but I knew better) had assigned the colorspace as sRGB but it was saying that it was an AdobeRGB file (probably more corruption, but I eventually found something that gave me some hint what was going on -- don't recall what I finally did to discover the problem, sorry). Anyway, it really caused havoc for the programs as they didn't know how to display the images.


Dunno if that helped, but hopefully it points you in one direction to ensure a consistent workflow and then do further debugging from there.

[amoringello]

FYI, Nice camera the K-r! I've got the K5. (Gotta love that they save in DNG format)
There's so few of us, I thought I should send a little message of support. :-) :-) :-)

[photofun]

I noticed the same problem with my images. In ACR click at the bottom where it says Adobe RGB and switch it to sRGB. I think that's was all I needed to do to correct my problem when saving to jpg. On my images that were already jpg I did as amoringello said Edit/Convert to Profile/sRGB. You'll have to work with you image to get that pop back to it but at least when you view it after saving it retains your changes in your viewer.

This image was before changes.


And this was after...

[arsenal_emyrates]

well i noticed something ,maybe a pro knows more about it ... the image saved as a .jpeg seems to loose it's pop when viewed on the computer , looking at the same photo uploaded here in the browser it seems like the pop and that nice glow are back ... can some one explain ?

[amoringello]

Originally Posted by arsenal_emyrates

well i noticed something ,maybe a pro knows more about it ... the image saved as a .jpeg seems to loose it's pop when viewed on the computer , looking at the same photo uploaded here in the browser it seems like the pop and that nice glow are back ... can some one explain ?

Yep, whatever you're using to view the images when its dull is likely due to that program not being color management aware, or not being able to properly display the color profile of that image. MSIE is a big culprit of not displaying images correctly.

If on Windows, I would highly suggest IrfanView as a small quick, and VERY capable viewer and file re-sizer, converter, and a few other tricks.
Firefox or Safari are pretty much best browser for viewing color managed image files.
Windows 7 is better, but MSIE 8 still does not handle color managed files very well.

On Mac, I've found nothing as nice and full features, fast and small as IrfanView... but for color management... it seems like the Mac just handles that more natively at the OS level, so most apps do pretty well.

[amoringello]

Oh, and when posting examples of images with two different appearances... you may need to do screen grabs of the two side by side. Posting the two images on the Internet will likely look just fine by people who use programs that handle the files properly. :-) :-)

[arsenal_emyrates]

yep it was all about the color space ,set to sRGB it shows everything anywhere ... so you would set the profile to sRGB when you intend the file for the web or on your computer and RGB when you intend to print it ?