My first gallery post, problem with color and sharpness

aleksanderpolo · Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 684

This is my first gallery post, however, I noticed that the color and sharpness is significantly different from the original pic. I already resized it to 1600 wide before uploading, wondering if I have done anything wrong? Can someone help me? Thanks.

Karhallarn · Joined: 26 May 2009 Posts: 577

Which color profile did you choose for the picture?

If it's Adobe RGB the flatness and loss in contrast are because the browser cuts the edges of the profile to make it sRGB!

Just export all your pictures to sRGB before uploading and it should be much better!

The other think is, did you turn on the color profile recognition in your browser? And do you use a calibrated monitor anyway?

cheers,

Karhallarn

aleksanderpolo · Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 684

Um, I have already used sRGB when I processed it in silkypix. When I open it with gimp, there is no problem (if I used aRGB, it would asked me to convert it, but not when I used sRGB), after resize it in gimp to 1600 wide, no problem either.

But after uploading to mflenses, the color and sharpness are changed when compared side by side with the resized pic. So, really no idea what went wrong...

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

Ditto what Karhallarn wrote about color. Regarding sharpness, however, we need a lot more information. For instance:

Was this photo taken with a film camera or digital?

If film, what was the film, and if digital, what was the resolution of the image? If film, what was the resolultion of the scanned image, and was it sharpened at all?

How did you digitize this photo? From a file? Did you scan a print?

If this is a digital image, did you do any post processing to it?

I could go on, but this should give you a bit of an idea as to what we'll need to know before we can provide more help.

Karhallarn · Joined: 26 May 2009 Posts: 577

What System are you working on? PC, Mac or Linux and what Browser are you using?

Karhallarn · Joined: 26 May 2009 Posts: 577

I think there is no problem with the sharpness but with the contrast which seems to reduce sharpness when low!

aleksanderpolo · Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 684

Um, perhaps I didn't state the problem clear enough... the problem is that the uploaded picture seem to have different color and sharpness in this thread when viewed from the web browser than the one viewed from window's picture viewer. Wish I can send you the picture so you can see it side by side...

aleksanderpolo · Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 684

O, I have uploaded the picture that was uploaded directly to mflenses at:

http://rapidshare.com/files/359159241/P1030874raw1600.jpg

If someone else can download it and see what the problem is, that would be great...

aleksanderpolo · Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 684

Um, after some testing, it looks like the color change is due to the browser. When I open the picture on firefox, it shows different color, wonder why and how I can fix it.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

Welp, I d/l'd the image you show at the link above and compared it to your original posted image. Really I don't see much difference at all (I'm using Mozilla's Seamonkey, which is more 'mature' (and superior imo) than Mozilla's Firefox). Both images do not appear to be critically sharp, which I would guess is due to misfocusing rather than anything else I can see.

I've read about this issue here before -- images not being displayed at the same level of quality as they are with one's image processing (or displaying) software. I don't really know why this happens, although I can state that it doesn't happen on my end. But then, I don't upload my images here or to image storage sites. I upload my images to my own website, and provide links to those images here. Does this make a difference? I dunno.

ManualFocus-G · Expire: 2014-11-24

I always double check the file is saved in sRGB. Also, I never use the upload feature here as the image will lose sharpness, regardless of size.

Karhallarn · Joined: 26 May 2009 Posts: 577

So, what browser are you using?

Internet Explorer replaces every Colorprofile with his own sRGB and this way screws your images.

Safari takes the profile out of the picture but can only display sRGB (as all internet), Firefox can handle color profiles but this must be activated.

So you can't really fix it! It depends on the browser you use! And even if your browser shows the perfect image the rest of the world sees that in a different light! Wink

Color management is a huge area and the are many bits and pieces that have to be syncronised to be trustfull!

cheers,

Karhallarn

ManualFocus-G · Expire: 2014-11-24

One other thing to check re: sharpness with Firefox, is that the browser isn't zoomed!

However, I still maintain there's a problem with uploaded files losing sharpness.

poilu · Expire: 2019-08-29

you uploaded a 1600px pic
the forum resize it to 1024px with a basic algorithm
better resize it yourself at 1024px
or upload at 1600px in the oversized gallery

mo · Expire: 2016-07-30

peterqd · Expire: 2014-01-04

It used to be the case that uploaded pictures became much sharper and contrastier when you clicked on them, compared to how they appeared in the general thread. I thought that had been fixed but maybe not...
I agree with poilu - resize the picture yourself to 1024 or less before you upload it.

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

rbelyell · Expire: 2014-01-31

sorry to say that i have always had this problem and continue to have this problem! there is significant difference in color, sharpness and contrast between original and uploaded pix. there still remains a difference if you 'click' on the photo. i have seen no change at all in the quality of this process. Crying or Very sad

aleksanderpolo · Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 684

Thank you all for your input, I am using firefox on PC, so can someone tell me how I can activate the color profile, or is it already activated?

When I was viewing the page side by side with picture viewer on windows 7, the difference in color and sharpness seems to be very significant. But now I am using a windows xp machine, they seem to look the same on the browser and on the viewer. So, perhaps this is a problem of how my windows 7 machine show the picture?

I will try to resize it to 1024 wide first before upload next time. Thanks all.

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

ManualFocus-G · Expire: 2014-11-24

Sorry to go off topic, but here's a test:

Original on Flickr:

Uploaded onto MF:

Sharpness seems fine now (used to be a problem), but colours look slightly colder in the MF image (or am I imagining it?! Laughing

). I think the function works just about fine now Smile

aleksanderpolo · Joined: 24 Jan 2010 Posts: 684

Great color, I don't think they will complain about their skin tone Laughing

I think I will need to calibrate my LCD and fix the color profile in my windows 7 machine when I get home. Have no idea how to do it, anyone has some pointers AKA cheap solutions?

visualopsins · Expire: 2025-04-11

From Shrek post, image uploaded here looks like less color saturation.

The board is using gd library, perhaps with ImageCreate function instead of CreateTrueColor option? (ref: http://www.boutell.com/gd/faq.html see answer to question "Why do my JPEG thumbnails have missing colors with gd 2.0.x?")

Attila · Expire: 2025-11-18

Big Dawg · Joined: 28 Jan 2009 Posts: 2530 Location: Thach Alabama

What aperture was this photographed with? May have been photographed with too wide an aperture thus the DOF is too shallow to allow all depths of the photo to be sharp when shot. Also if your camera has in-camera contrast controls up the contrast a few stops and the sharpness by at least one stop.