LR Develop Mode Issue?

[Tracy341931059ose]

I am having an issue with my RAW and TIF images needing to have a increase in saturdation in the Develop mode in order to have a finished jpeg that doesn't look extremely desaturated.  I have been working in LR and PS for about 5 years.  I used to primarily edit images for web and social media use and never thought about complete color matching but now I am printing images and there is a extreme difference in the color saturation in LR Develop mode to what I see if I pull same image into PS from LR and also when I export from LR as a JPEG with the SRGB color space.  I've had a holiday card printed at a professional lab  and it came back so desaturdated from what I thought I had sent them.  I think also the brightness of my monitor threw me off a little also but there is a clear saturation issue from LR Develop mode to finished JPEG for printing and actually printed.  My monitor is brand new and color calibrated.  I realize you need to calibrate often but I don't think that is the issue here.  My concern is that I don't want to overly saturate images in LR Develop just to get an end result that is mildly acceptable, and isn't desaturated. Thoughts?

Including screenshots of one example - from LR Develop (as a TIFF) and from Exported JPEG viewed from windows photos and a cell phone pic of the printed image from the pro lab.  The difference is not quite as marked on the screenshots.  The printed image actually looks worse, way less saturated and I guess because the monitor has brightness that the printed photo doesn't, the printed photo looks darker in the blacks, shadows and contrast.

I'm worried about printing images for people and having them be so starkly different from LR to all other platforms.

I don't see a visual difference between SOFT PROOF and regular viewing in LR.  For the RAW images in Lightroom I see a profile as Adobe Standard. 

[Jao vdL]

How are you calibrating your display? The symptoms you're showing here are consistent with a bad monitor profile. Recalibration (using calibration hardware) will help in that case. It is also possible that you have an outdated driver for your GPU so check on the GPU manufactirer website (windows update only has out of date drivers for many cards). Also note that windows photos does not color manage. However Chrome, Firefox and Edge do, so to see the correct color (if you have a color calibrated display and up-to-date drivers) use those apps, photoshop, or Lightroom.

[Per Berntsen]

Also note that windows photos does not color manage.

By @Jao vdL

The Windows Photos app is in fact color managed, Microsoft finally got around to fixing it a couple of years ago.

So it should display correct colors, provided that the monitor profile is healthy and accurate.

[Jao vdL]

Thanks that is good to know!

[Tracy341931059ose]

My monitor is brand new from Dell.  A really good quality gaming monitor.  It's literally less than a week old.

[Tracy341931059ose]

I have not calibrated it yet because it's brand new from Dell.  I have the calibration report.  I'm assuming there wouldn't be driver issues.  My desktop is new also. 

[Jao vdL]

Dell monitors are notorious for having corrupt color profiles in their driver installations and they generally need to be profiled which is done using calibration hardware. The latter is an essential tool if you want your color to come out right. These are calibration pucks that hang on your display and measure the actual color output. Often times photo clubs or even public libraries have these for loan if you don't want to buy one. Unfortunately there is no shortcut here and seldomly (there are exceptions but rare) will a monitor display correct color out of the box.

You can test if this is a problem by going into your display properties in the color management tab and deleting any profile you see there. This will make windows assign sRGB as the monitor's color profile. If you now not see any difference between export and Lightroom display, this was the issue. You would still need to calibrate and profile the monitor though.

Also really check the driver version for your GPU card. Check the manufacturer's website and don't rely on windows update. Most of the problems we see here are due to out of date drivers. It being a new machine is not a guarantee (actually quite the opposite) that the driver is current.

[Jao vdL]

Oh and for the pro lab print, make sure to use a color space in your export that works for the lab. SOme labs that bill themselves as pro are decidely not so and don't color manage correctly. If you send them a prophotoRGB image, you might get a deeply desaturated print back.

[Tracy341931059ose]

I think basically SRGB is it, it's what they recommended.  I also noticed in Lightroom Classic that you could select your camera profile that you used - for example Canon - Faithful or Portrait.  If you also select that in Lightroom the colors change on the display.

[Jao vdL]

Camera profiles are very different from icc color space profiles. Camera profiles change the interpretation of the raw data in your raw files. They basically translate from the raw camera data into a known color space. This is done as there is no absolutel standard to interpret raw data and the precise color response of each camera sensor is different. Also this is much more of an artistic choice than it is to perfectly describe what a scene looked like (which would lead to extremely boring pictures)

ICC color space profiles such as sRGB, display P3, adobeRGB, etc. are more like coordinate systems or relative scale your existing colors are defined in. They don't actually change the colors but they change the numbers in a file. It's like defining a distance in inches instead of centimers. The distance is the same but the number is different. They also define the range of colors that can be described (the length of your measuring stick). This is called the possible gamut of a color space. For example in display P3 you can describe much deeper reds than is sRGB. In adobeRGB you can describe more saturated greens. in prophotoRGB, you can describe more saturated colors overall. However if a color falls within each color space's gamut, the color is exactly the same in each but will have different numerical values in each.

[Tracy341931059ose]

even taking away monitor calibration I still have the issue that what I see in lightroom as I am editing an image and deciding how I want the color and tone to be etc etc, then I save it as a high res jpeg in sRGB and then open that jpeg - whether in photoshop or whether in windows photo viewer - it doesn't matter - I have a completely different image.  It is desaturated - like night and day difference from the camera raw image that I edited.  Both the camera raw image and the pjeg are being viewed on the very same monitor.  I really want to address this and understand why and how I might be able to fix this before I think about how these jpegs are going to print.  Is there some reason that the saturation would look so drastically different from LR Develop Mode to LR Export and a full size JPEG in SRGB?

[Per Berntsen]

You most likely have a defective monitor profile. As mentioned by @Jao vdL , Dell profiles are notoriously bad, and very often defective out of the box.

The monitor profile is used by color manged applications to display correct colors. 

When you open an image, the colors are converted from the document profile (for instance sRGB or Adobe RGB) to the monitor profile. For colors to display correctly, the monitor profile needs to be accurate – i.e. contain an accurate description of your monitor's color response.

The best way to get an accurate monitor profile is by calibrating your monitor with a hardware calibrator. This will also create and install a custom monitor profile that describes your monitor accurately.

If you don't have a calibrator, you can, as troubleshooting and as a possible temporary fix, try setting the monitor profile to sRGB. If your monitor is wide gamut, use Adobe RGB. (what model is your Dell monitor?)

Close all color managed applications. (Lightroom, Photoshop, Photos app)

Press the Windows key +R, type colorcpl in the box and press Enter.

Add the sRGB (or Adobe RGB) profile, then set it as default.

Also make sure that your GPU driver is up to date. Do not rely on Windows to keep it up to date, go to the manufacturer's website and check for a new version.

In the future, please post proper screenshots rather than phone pictures.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-snipping-tool-to-capture-screenshots-00246869-1843-6...

Also please do not attach images, use the Insert Photos button in the toolbar.