I'm having a problem in transferring photos from Adobe Lightroom 1.4 to my webpage. When I look at the webpage on my Mac, they look great. When I go to a windows machine, the colors on the photos look, dull and the colors washed out. They are all JPG's so I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Please advice and thanks for all your help in advance.
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Digital Photographs
- Thread starter yankfan
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Any chance your Mac has a glossy monitor? The new Mac monitors are made to exaggerate saturation and contrast for your viewing pleasure, but do away with color and contrast accuracy in doing so. You might try calibrating your monitor to match the windows machine.
I'm no expert on this kind of thing but I suspect that this is either something to do with the characteristics of the two screens, or the gamma settings of the computers to which they are attached. Or, perhaps, the browser you're using on the mac uses colour profiling and the one on the PC doesn't. Probably a bit of all.
You can change your Mac's gamma in displays in system prefs but probably best to wait for someone who knows what they're talking about.
You can change your Mac's gamma in displays in system prefs but probably best to wait for someone who knows what they're talking about.
Some old but interesting info on the differences between web photos viewed on a Mac vs. Windows.
Not sure how relevant this is to your situation, but clearly there are differences to be considered.
Not sure how relevant this is to your situation, but clearly there are differences to be considered.
The first thing I would change is your gamma. The default gamma for windows is 2.2, and the default for OSX is 1.8. So, your Mac is set brighter than a Windows machine out of the box. If you are working with photos and designs that require cross platform consistency I would set your Mac to 2.2 to start. Everything will get a bit darker, but will be more consistent.
Now, on to what I think the main problem is....
What colour space are you saving your photos in when you export them from Lightroom?
The only colour aware browser right now is Safari (well, and the latest Firefox). In order for you to have colour consistency across different platforms and browsers you need to save your jpg's in the sRGB colour space.. which is the only colour space browsers like IE recognize.
I would bet you are saving your photos from Lightroom in Adobe RGB or some other colour space, uploading them, and viewing them in Safari.... where they will look fine because Safari is colour aware. But, when you go to Windows, IE or whatever browser you are using doesn't recognize that colour space, and you get the problems you are finding.
Save and reupload them in sRGB and all should be well!
^^ as James said Saving for web use in sRGB should solve the problem, color managed workflows all good and well as long as you remember this,there is much about the differences on the internet on understanding of how the sRGB vs Abode RGB works
good luck.sRGB or Adobe 1998
FWIW, I exported a collection of photos for the web (as opposed to publishing them - I use Gallery on my site) to confirm that Lightroom converts the images to the sRGB color space as part of the process, and it does. I am using LR 2.2, but I would imagine earlier versions of LR perform similarly for this function. Your problem probably lies somewhere else.
Have you calibrated your monitor? I would suggest an X-Rite i1 Display2 to calibrate your monitor and make sure everything in your color space is set up properly.