Processed / exported images on Win 10 look terrible
OK all, I am new to the world of Capture One and photo editing. So maybe I'm missing something obvious, but this is just bizarre.
Open up a picture in a new session. Do a bunch of edits, crop it. create two layers each with its own mask. do some darkening and desaturation in one layer brightening in the other layer. So far so good.
I go to the process tab and select a JPG recipe. Now, I might have changed some stuff from the default out of the box jpg recipe, I can't remember. But as far as I know there's nothing in the recipe that would explain the behavior of what I am seeing.
So I select my image I select the process recipe, I click the process button and boom I see it gets created in the output folder.
If I navigate to the output folder in capture one and select the picture, it looks great. Just like the edits I made in the capture folder.
But if I go to the folder on my windows 10 system and open it up in the default windows picture previewer it looks TERRIBLE. It looks like someone bumped up the saturation of the whole picture. Interestingly, the crop is correct. (I cropped it from a 16x9 to a square image. So that much it did. But if i rearrange the wnindows so that I can see the square image in capture one beside the same image in the windows 10 picture viewer, it is like night and day. Again, in capture one it looks just like I want it to. In the Windows 10 previewer, it looks terrible.
I re-exported several times using several different process recipes of jpg and png and saw the same behavior over and over.
Here's where it gets even weirder. I decided to see ow the picture looked in a browser. I use the brave browser, which uses the same rendering engine as chrome. I opened the image up in the brave browser. At first, It looked terrible in the exact same way that it did in the windows 10 previewer. But I got distracted for a a few seconds and when I looked bck, the picture had changed and it looked exactly like I wanted it too. WTF? So just to make sure I was not going insane. I deleted the image, re-exported from Capture one using a different file name. I loaded it up in brave and stared at the image. Sure enough, when it first loaded it looked terrible. But after about 5 seconds or so, the image some how changed right before my eyes into the correct edit.
Someone please tell me I am not going insane and that this is a known phenomena. Bonus points if you can help me figure out how to make pics display correctly on Windows 10. It's really quite annoying because i have no idea how they are going to look when I upload them to the web.
Calvin Powers
Open up a picture in a new session. Do a bunch of edits, crop it. create two layers each with its own mask. do some darkening and desaturation in one layer brightening in the other layer. So far so good.
I go to the process tab and select a JPG recipe. Now, I might have changed some stuff from the default out of the box jpg recipe, I can't remember. But as far as I know there's nothing in the recipe that would explain the behavior of what I am seeing.
So I select my image I select the process recipe, I click the process button and boom I see it gets created in the output folder.
If I navigate to the output folder in capture one and select the picture, it looks great. Just like the edits I made in the capture folder.
But if I go to the folder on my windows 10 system and open it up in the default windows picture previewer it looks TERRIBLE. It looks like someone bumped up the saturation of the whole picture. Interestingly, the crop is correct. (I cropped it from a 16x9 to a square image. So that much it did. But if i rearrange the wnindows so that I can see the square image in capture one beside the same image in the windows 10 picture viewer, it is like night and day. Again, in capture one it looks just like I want it to. In the Windows 10 previewer, it looks terrible.
I re-exported several times using several different process recipes of jpg and png and saw the same behavior over and over.
Here's where it gets even weirder. I decided to see ow the picture looked in a browser. I use the brave browser, which uses the same rendering engine as chrome. I opened the image up in the brave browser. At first, It looked terrible in the exact same way that it did in the windows 10 previewer. But I got distracted for a a few seconds and when I looked bck, the picture had changed and it looked exactly like I wanted it too. WTF? So just to make sure I was not going insane. I deleted the image, re-exported from Capture one using a different file name. I loaded it up in brave and stared at the image. Sure enough, when it first loaded it looked terrible. But after about 5 seconds or so, the image some how changed right before my eyes into the correct edit.
Someone please tell me I am not going insane and that this is a known phenomena. Bonus points if you can help me figure out how to make pics display correctly on Windows 10. It's really quite annoying because i have no idea how they are going to look when I upload them to the web.
Calvin Powers
-
[quote="calvin.powers" wrote:
Someone please tell me I am not going insane and that this is a known phenomena. Bonus points if you can help me figure out how to make pics display correctly on Windows 10. It's really quite annoying because i have no idea how they are going to look when I upload them to the web.
Calvin Powers
Which colour profile are you using? -
[quote="Bobtographer" wrote:
[quote="calvin.powers" wrote:
Someone please tell me I am not going insane and that this is a known phenomena. Bonus points if you can help me figure out how to make pics display correctly on Windows 10. It's really quite annoying because i have no idea how they are going to look when I upload them to the web.
Calvin Powers
Which colour profile are you using?
I am using sRGB. -
You can see an example of my problem
http://calvinpowers.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/photo-problem.png
From left to right, the first sindow shows the capture one edited version, pre-export. I.e. the variant I am working on.
The middle widow shows the exported (sRGB recipe) image in the brave browser and it looks great. The third window shows the windows 10 built in picture viewer and you can see it looks super saturated and reddish.
I did some other tests on different photo editors and lots of them also show the image badly. I was surprised that GIMP displays the image poorly. Likewise with the built in paint program and the libre office draw program. In fact the only thing that seems to display the image correctly is the brave browser.
So the mystery deepens. Could it be that I need to change the colorspace used when editing on capture one? If so how would I do that? On the output recipe I have sRGB IEC61966-2.1 selected. Is that the one I should be using for images destined for the web?
Any thoughts, theories, suggestions appreciated!! -
[quote="Bobtographer" wrote:
How is your screen calibrated?
Hmmm, Wasn't really sure how to answer that question. I'm new to the world of photography and editing.
But I went into advanced display options and noticed a panel called color management. The default was set to something generlicly labeled "Laptop LCD monitor". There are lots of additional "ICC Profiles" listed, which were all greek to me, but I did notice one called sRGB IEC61966-2.1 which is the same label I see on my output recipes. So I selected that an rebooted my machine.
That has helped a LOT. So I learned something today!
Thanks -
[quote="calvin.powers" wrote:
[quote="Bobtographer" wrote:
How is your screen calibrated?
Hmmm, Wasn't really sure how to answer that question. I'm new to the world of photography and editing.
But I went into advanced display options and noticed a panel called color management. The default was set to something generlicly labeled "Laptop LCD monitor". There are lots of additional "ICC Profiles" listed, which were all greek to me, but I did notice one called sRGB IEC61966-2.1 which is the same label I see on my output recipes. So I selected that an rebooted my machine.
That has helped a LOT. So I learned something today!
Thanks
Sorry, but you risk to have learnt a wrong lesson this way 'cause your "the same label" assumption is simply bad. sRGB is a working color space. Monitor profiles have to describe your monitor color properties, so using a standard color space as monitor profile is not a proper thing to do. The more they differ, the bad it is.
The issue you described for example matches what happens viewing an sRGB picture in a wide-gamut monitor through a non color-managed viewer. Was that the actual situation? I don't know. Where does that "Laptop LCD monitor" come from? Did you install it with your monitor? Did you ever have it calibrated with a colorimeter? Was it just loaded or activated too?
It's obvious that what you are doing is based on what you don't know about color management so I would suggest you to go and read something about it to have a comprehension of what icc profiles are and what they are used for. And so I would suggest you to remove any color profile set in advanced display options until you have an idea if that is good or not. -
The issue you described for example matches what happens viewing an sRGB picture in a wide-gamut monitor through a non color-managed viewer. Was that the actual situation? I don't know. Where does that "Laptop LCD monitor" come from? Did you install it with your monitor? Did you ever have it calibrated it with a colorimeter? Was it just loaded or activated too?
The original color profile is what came with the laptop and I have never calibrated the screen or anything else. So yeah, i'll need to go do some reading because I don't care how nice it looks in Capture One if it does not look nice on other people's screens. -
[quote="calvin.powers" wrote:
The issue you described for example matches what happens viewing an sRGB picture in a wide-gamut monitor through a non color-managed viewer. Was that the actual situation? I don't know. Where does that "Laptop LCD monitor" come from? Did you install it with your monitor? Did you ever have it calibrated it with a colorimeter? Was it just loaded or activated too?
The original color profile is what came with the laptop and I have never calibrated the screen or anything else. So yeah, i'll need to go do some reading because I don't care how nice it looks in Capture One if it does not look nice on other people's screens.
You're working with a Laptop.. do you know if it's using a TN or IPS screen? -
You're working with a Laptop.. do you know if it's using a TN or IPS screen?
I have a Thinkpad X1 and according to this page ThinkPads have IPS displays:
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/faqs/pc-life-faqs/what-is-ips/
Please sign in to leave a comment.
Comments
11 comments