Why does my picture have a different saturation inside Photoshop?

M

Mike

New member
I took a raw image with my camera, increased the saturation in photoshop and then saved it to my desktop as a jpeg. However the image looks different depending on what application I use to open it. If I use photoshop, it looks the way I want it (increased saturation) but if I use Firefox or windows picture viewer it looks paler. I can't figure out why, its the same file.

Heres what I mean:
http://s536.photobucket.com/albums/ff327/UserLog2323/?action=view&current=Comparisson.jpg
 
Certain applications might translate the color profile in your photograph differently than others, and this is always true for the internet. The internet has its own constraints on the range of color that can be viewed in a browser (to save loading time of webpages).

While there is no way to make certain the way you open it in photoshop will be perfect on the web, there are some steps you can take to make it as good as possible. This might sounds odd, but never use the "save for web" feature. It actually makes the color worse... but on the other hand, at least it will look like crap consistently for everyone.

I think the best way is to first convert the profile to SRGB with the perceptual option, then save as jpeg. Quality settings lower than 9 may have more visible defects. To save even more file size, you can say "no" to creating image previews.

I wish i knew more about windows picture viewer, but I bet it is doing the same thing as firefox... it sees your photo with a certain color profile, but is programmed to view it differently than photoshop would. Converting your file to SRGB (one of the smaller color spaces) should make it look the best it can look in the most places.
 
Your RAW image is either in the Adobe RGB or ProPhoto color space which is larger than what the web outputs, which is sRGB. Convert your photo in Photoshop to sRGB then do your saturations to better see how the image will output on the web.
 
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