Color profiles: What's the professional workflow when working with iPhone photos?

[L.Rhode]

Hello professionals,

I (not a photo pro) recently ran into problems when working with iPhone photos as source material:
A record artwork I designed appeared washed out on Spotify and such. So I searched & learned that iPhone pictures use and contain a non-standard extended color profile called "Display P3". I had done the design work with Affinity Photo, which simply carried that profile over to the final export and never gave a warning. Very annoying. Spotify only accepts sRGB and converted the file into a hazy blargh. 

So now I bought a Photoshop subscription, hoping to get closer to "industry standard" results. But it's not immediately clear to me at what point you should do the conversion, and if you can (ideally) make it a standard preference? How do you do it in your day-to-day business?

Thanks a lot for your insights !

[Conrad C]

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@L.Rhode wrote:

Thanks a lot for the insights. I can imagine it feels like a problem from decades ago. The thing is just... if Spotify refuses to update their process, that's kind of a big deal. Effectively it means that all of the music industry needs to convert to sRGB just to be sure, because Spotify is the de-facto standard they all work towards.

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Although I “blamed” Spotify, they do have a point in saying that a pro should be able to deal with this (not saying it’s your fault though). The reason is that the Spotify situation is the same as any time a design might go into a non-color-managed workflow. Because although color management has become a standard in some tightly controlled production workflows, there are still many other workflows where color management is not completely supported, the most glaring being web and mobile. An experienced designer should be prepared to deal with those workflows, and that usually means anticipating that they might have to manually convert from whatever color space their images is in to sRGB. This is second nature to many experienced web designers and video production designers, and I think that is what Spotify was expecting. I think that is also why the “washed out” phenomenon would happen across other services: If those services are web/mobile based (as both Spotify and Soundcloud are), their graphics workflows might all be sRGB-based without automatic color management, requiring the same handling.

To summarize that: Although it would be best if Spotify could handle any color space coming in, and although is it not totally right that they do not, the fact is that they are not a special case because the way they work is still quite common in web/mobile design. So it is not totally out of line for then to expect a designer to anticipate having to send them artwork pre-converted to sRGB.

As I said, this slowly changed in the printing industry, and it is slowly changing in the video and web/mobile industries. Give it another couple decades and maybe everything will be color-managed by then, but for now, we have to be aware of and watch out for the workflow gaps, and cover those gaps ourselves when needed (by converting before handoff).

[NB, colourmanagement net]

Hi

you’ve read the chat here, I hope, about sRGB and "lowest common denominator" working, where it's often the presumed profile for browsers dealing with images without embedded profiles. Maybe the originator didn't embed, maybe the website stripped the profile. 

iPhones are actually pretty consistent -one to the next - and do quite a good job with images in the P3 colourspace. (mine does an OK job of matching my Eizo Coloredge screen when both display the same image).

iPhones also manage OK with sRGB images, which is what most users place online. 

Why not try this [display P3] image on your phone in Safari: 

https://tinyurl.com/mobiletestimage-jpg

Now try this screen version in Photoshop on your computer:
https://www.colourmanagement.net/downloads/CMnet_Pixl_AdobeRGB_testimage05.zip

You seem to have an issue with the difference between the phone screen and your display screen, you've written that your own system is not (and may never be) colourmanaged, hmm.

What that means is that your own display could possibly be set way over saturated and contrasty and / or too bright. In the circumstances, if your own device my potentially be out of control, it's not really reasonable to expect it to match any other device unless all devices are a well controlled.  Colour management was designed to provide a reasonable match in appearance between differing devices. 

Everyone needs it.

I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net :: adobe forum volunteer
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management
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