colour space (again)

[M.Chapman]

5 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

Both your charts -- AdobeRGB and sRGB -- look a bit darker in C1 Express than they do in Elements and Affinity. As mentioned, my current monitor leaves much to be desired, but I do calibrate it every month or so. Not sure if monitor quality might have something to do with it...

 

The quality of your monitor won't be the issue (providing the same monitor profile is being applied by all packages). If one package is showing a jpg image differently to another and so much so that you can see it by eye, then there's something different with the colour management (or settings) in one of them. It could be the implementation as Micheal says, but if the difference is large then I usually find it's due to an incorrect setting somewhere.

 

Out of curiosity, any chance of posting a side by side screenshot (two or 3 apps open and displaying the chart).

 

Mark

[M.Chapman]

I resaved those colour charts as jpgs (instead of pngs) for wider use as my experiments show that some packages don't support colour management on pngs

https://i.postimg.cc/W41GJVGp/Marks-SRGB-test-chart-2.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/MG3y7L57/Marks-Adobe-RGB-test-chart-2.jpg

 

Mark

 

[John Mitchell]

10 hours ago, M.Chapman said:

The quality of your monitor won't be the issue (providing the same monitor profile is being applied by all packages). If one package is showing a jpg image differently to another and so much so that you can see it by eye, then there's something different with the colour management (or settings) in one of them. It could be the implementation as Micheal says, but if the difference is large then I usually find it's due to an incorrect setting somewhere.

 

Out of curiosity, any chance of posting a side by side screenshot (two or 3 apps open and displaying the chart).

 

Mark

 

Here you go, Mark. I used the new AdobeRGB jpg chart that you saved. Capture One Express is on the left. The colours look a bit duller to me than in PS Elements.

 

 

 

 

Edited March 14, 2023 by John Mitchell

[spacecadet]

7 minutes ago, John Mitchell said:

 

Hopefully the link below works. I used the new AdobeRGB jpg chart that you saved. Capture One Express is on the left. Th colours look a bit duller to me than in PS Elements.

 

https://m.psecn.photoshelter.com/mem/img-get/I0000kNqemArIRqU/s/1000?1678841486

 

 

Unavailable.

[John Mitchell]

5 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

Unavailable.

 

That's odd. The link is working for me. Back to the drawing board...

[John Mitchell]

13 minutes ago, John Mitchell said:

 

That's odd. The link is working for me. Back to the drawing board...

 

Fixed, I think.

[M.Chapman]

2 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

 

Here you go, Mark. I used the new AdobeRGB jpg chart that you saved. Capture One Express is on the left. The colours look a bit duller to me than in PS Elements.

 

 

No problems with the rendering there John. The corresponding colour patches in both images have the same RGB values within +/-1. If your eyes are seeing them as different it's an optical illusion (possibly caused by the very different backgrounds). You can test it for yourself by opening that side by side screenshot image in PS and inspecting the RGB values of the patches with the eyedropper.

 

Suggest you might want to set your PSE and C1 Express backgrounds to the same colour. This will help with consistency.

 

However, what you've loaded here is the sRGB test image, can you try the same with the AdobeRGB image? (As that's where problems are more likely to arise).

 

Mark 

Edited March 14, 2023 by M.Chapman

[John Mitchell]

51 minutes ago, M.Chapman said:

No problems with the rendering there John. The corresponding colour patches in both images have the same RGB values within +/-1. If your eyes are seeing them as different it's an optical illusion (possibly caused by the very different backgrounds). You can test it for yourself by opening that side by side screenshot image in PS and inspecting the RGB values of the patches with the eyedropper.

 

Suggest you might want to set your PSE and C1 Express backgrounds to the same colour. This will help with consistency.

 

However, what you've loaded here is the sRGB test image, can you try the same with the AdobeRGB image? (As that's where problems are more likely to arise).

 

Mark 

 

Sorry about that. It occurred to me that I should be using the same colour background for all three programs. Good suggestion. Here's the AdobeRGB comparison (I hope).

 

 

Here's Affinity Photo as well:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 14, 2023 by John Mitchell

[M.Chapman]

4 minutes ago, John Mitchell said:

 

Sorry about that. It occurred to me that I should be using the same colour background for all three programs. Good suggestion. Here's the AdobeRGB comparison (I hope).

 

 

Good news. The corresponding colour patches in both images have the same RGB values within +/-1. Not only that, the colours are displayed with the same values as those in the SRGB test image within +/-1. This shows that both programs are correctly interpreting the AdobeRGB profile.

 

So both PSE and C1 are working in the same way on your system and your colours will be consistent when displaying the same file in either application. This doesn't mean your colours will be accurate as that depends on your monitor and its calibration, but it's a good start.

 

Now check the third program?

 

Mark

[John Mitchell]

2 minutes ago, M.Chapman said:

Good news. The corresponding colour patches in both images have the same RGB values within +/-1. Not only that, the colours are displayed with the same values as those in the SRGB test image within +/-1. This shows that both programs are correctly interpreting the AdobeRGB profile.

 

So both PSE and C1 are working in the same way on your system and your colours will be consistent when displaying the same file in either application. This doesn't mean your colours will be accurate as that depends on your monitor and its calibration, but it's a good start.

 

Now check the third program?

 

Mark

 

See posts above this one -- just added Affinity.

Edited March 14, 2023 by John Mitchell

[M.Chapman]

25 minutes ago, John Mitchell said:

 

See posts above this one -- just added Affinity.

That looks good too. You're all set now.

 

Mark

 

 

[M.Chapman]

This has been a useful exercise. I've been testing my software at the same time and proved that my FastRawViewer's thumbnails aren't right for AdobeRGB images (they come out dull), maybe there's a setting I've missed? Update - now fixed. I found another cross platform image browser that seems to do everything I need (XnViewMP). I checked the red patch with AdobeRGB profile in a wide range of packages and measured the consistency of rendering when using my montors calibrated profile (close to AdobeRGB). The RGB values I saw and packages are

 

117 0 0 - Photoshop 2023

117 1 0 - PSE 7 in Win 7

117 1 5 - Adobe Bridge 2023

117 1 0 - Lightroom Classic 12.2

117 1 0 - BreezeBrowser Pro (thumbnails and previews)

118 0 0 - C1 Express 23 (Editor)

118 0 5 - C1 Express 23 (Thumbnails - compressed)

117 1 1  - Affinity 2

118 0 5 - FastRawViewer thumbnails

117 1 5 - FastRawViewer Previews

118 0 5 - XnView (thumbnails and previews)

 

That's a pretty high level of consistency. Certainly above the levels my eyes can see.

 

Also discovered a couple of useful colour picker apps for MacOS checking the rendering consistency. Color Picker and ChromaLab (which also names the colour picked- useful for keywording images!)

 

Mark

Edited March 14, 2023 by M.Chapman

[John Mitchell]

4 hours ago, M.Chapman said:

That looks good too. You're all set now.

 

Mark

 

 

 

Thanks again, Mark. Definitely a learning experience for me. I'm not good at this stuff. Something else that I find disconcerting is how fast my monitor goes out of calibration. It seems to take only a few weeks for colours to drift over to the warm side. The monitor (a Samsung) must be ten years old by now, which could have something to do with it.

[M.Chapman]

I double checked FastRawViewer this morning and I find that changing a setting to fix the rendering of thumbnails of AdobeRGB images breaks the rendering of thumbnails of sRGB images.    I've reported the issue to FRV as a bug/feature request. They replied that it would be too slow to handle thumbnails with in different colour spaces (a bit surprising since most packages seem to manage it). So FastRawViewer is out for now and I'll try XnView instead.

 

Mark

Edited March 15, 2023 by M.Chapman