Photography Troubleshooting: Dull Images on dA?

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After a long pause in which nobody seemed to have very many questions, we've got a very intriguing one which came up during the People & Portraits projecteducate week and it's something that has always played on my mind, and no doubt on yours too. Once again sine-out has provided a fantastic answer, so hopefully that will help somewhat in clearing this issue up. Have a question? Drop it on this article and we'll work on an answer!



"It seems like colorful pictures made in adobe look good, then after
they have been uploaded on deviantART... the color is more dead.. not so
alive..is this an issue?" ~ KayArneJohansen



"Hi KayArneJohansen, the issue your describing is most likely a colour profile issue. Colour profiles essentially describe how each colour is represented and there are different profiles for different purpose but mostly for getting accurate colour out of a printer or a screen.

By default the internet works with and assumes that every image uses the sRGB colour profile, this is a very narrow colour profile, but it's nearly ubiquitous (hence the reason why it's a defacto standard), so nearly all web based images are saved using that profile.

Photoshop, however, is colour space/profile aware, and can save images to virtually any colour profile imaginable, most of which are much larger than the sRGB colour profile. One of the most popular of these is the AdobeRGB colour profile.

If you save an image using the AdobeRGB profile and then display it in a web browser, the images can appear duller (it should be noted that most modern browsers support colour profiles these days, but a lot of websites strip the colour profile information from any images uploaded, which forces those web browsers to assume the image is using sRGB).

To correct this issue, when you're saving off your image for uploading, Click on Edit > Convert to Profile, then select the destination space to sRGB. If the colours shift dramatically when you do that, then click on the 'Intent' drop down box and choose from the list until the image looks as close to the original as possible.

Because sRGB is such a small colour profile, make sure you save this image as a copy and don't overwrite your source file, as this is a lossy conversion. Hope that helps!"
~ sine-out

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Charlene-Art's avatar
I was always wondering this!