smugblog: Getting Great Prints

Two years after I posted it, the original SmugMug alters my colors! entry gets lots of passionate comments from smart people.

Problem is, we changed and so did browsers in the last two years.

By customer demand, we now attach ICC profiles to the photos we display if we sense that you’re using a browser like Safari that can use them.  We do it, that is, for images that are larger than thumbnails, because it doubles the size of thumbnails and for some people that would make pages load slower.

For some people who use color-aware browsers like Safari, it means you could see a color shift between thumbs and larger display images.  We asked a great number of customers about this and the answer among almost everyone was, “better to see the big ones the way they should be seen”, and “this is a great compromise between speed and color fidelity.”

However, it’s understandably confusing to customers who have not been exposed to ICC profiles.  Look at the difference between how Firefox displays this photo (on the left) and Safari (right):

Firefox (version 2) is displaying the photo the way IE would.  Safari is displaying it the way Photoshop would.

It gets worse, unfortunately.  Our customers also love the Flash slideshow, but few know that even Safari ignores ICC profiles when using Flash.  Our full-screen Flash slideshow is immensely popular because of its smooth transitions, but even Safari will display photos like IE does when Flash is used.

The question that just kills people is why do sRGB files sometimes look different depending on what program displays them?  People most often notice it when they open an sRGB file in Photoshop and then select Photoshop’s Save for Web feature.  Save for Web gives a preview of how it will look on the Internet, and by default shows how it would look if the browser doesn’t respect ICC profiles.  Many people notice a color shift when using Save for Web.

The answer to that question is beyond the scope of this post but usually has to do with monitor calibration.

One difficult thing we’ve observed with monitor calibration is that most people put great faith in it.  At SmugMug, we all have very high quality monitors in a dual configuration, both on Macs and some PCs.  Most of us calibrate with various manufacturer’s calibration devices. usually fairly high end.  But none of us have been able to get our monitors to match.  On every dual monitor machine at SmugMug, when you view photos in Photoshop and move them from one monitor to another, you see the colors shift.  Macs that are side by side, calibrated with the same hardware, display images differently.

We have a saying when it comes to getting great prints:  ”In the Photoshop eyedropper tool we trust.”  The words of death we hear so often are, “it looked different on my calibrated monitor.”

One way to see that SmugMug is really not changing your file (other than to add an ICC profile) is to use the File > Open menu with your browser software.  Open a photo from a file on your hard disk, and also open it with Photoshop.  Depending on your system, you may see a color shift.  But if you compare the file you opened on your hard disk with your browser to the same file you uploaded to SmugMug, viewed with the same browser, they should look the same.

If they don’t, there could be two reasons:

1.  Is the photo on your hard disk missing the ICC profile and you are viewing it with a browser like Safari?  We add the ICC profile for Safari users.

2.  Is the photo in some other color space than sRGB?  We only display them in sRGB at SmugMug, because it’s the only color space browsers like IE can display correctly.

Clear as mud?!

The great news about monitors is they keep getting brighter. But the brighter they become, the more people are disappointed by dark prints.

Dark prints are now the #1 reason prints are returned:

The problem is, the brighter the monitor, the more dark shots look normal. But while monitors get brighter each year, prints never change. They are still illuminated by the subdued light of homes, whereas photos on computer monitors get lit from behind by the ever-brighter power of flat panels.

Here’s what you can do about it:

http://www.smugmug.com/help/too-dark

Most wedding dresses have anti-stain coatings that are fluorescent — meaning they glow blue when you shine UV light on them.

Unfortunately, most flashes emit UV unless you place a filter over their heads. Using the Canon EX550 flash for fill made this dress blue where the flash hit it hardest:

Some photographers have a photoshop action to look for the brightest part of the photo and turn it white. The assumption is the brightest part of the photo must be the dress.

But that wouldn’t help the blue grass near the dress, which is lit by the blue light coming off of it:

I have seen photographers place plastic warming filters over their flash heads that also cut the UV. Warming filters can be selected to match the color of indoor light so you can use fill flash in a chapel with the fill being the same color as the light inside.

Here’s our blue dress corrected, but notice it didn’t remove the blue from the grass around the dress:

Anyone have favorite filters for their flash heads?

I don’t know why this isn’t mentioned in books and forums, but we certainly see it often with even the best digital cameras.

In shots taken with on-board flash, the poor fair-skinned caucasian with little skin pigment, a redish complexion, or blemishes goes nuclear:

Neither your eye nor film sees near-infrared light. But common in-camera and on-board flashes emit it, fair caucasians reflect it, and digital cameras record it. And they record it as extra red your eye didn’t see.

It’s a tough problem because correcting a nuclearized face by removing magenta, adding yellow, etc., makes everyone else look like they were semeared with bronzing makeup. The only way to do it seems to be to mask off the offending area and correct just that part, as some autocorrect software does like i2e.

Here’s more info on the problem.

Anyone else seen this and have something to contribute?

Apple is The King of Simplicity, except when it comes to the simple job of displaying photos on the Internet.

It was actually Microsoft and HP who came up with a very simple idea: let’s use the same box of crayons for all photos on the Internet. And since we expect the Internet to be viewed on TV and TV to be viewed on the Internet, we’d better choose crayons that work for both.

Apple went its own way with painful results. Here’s 1 photo, 3 browsers, 4 different colors:

Every Windows browser — such as Internet Explorer & Firefox — adhere to The Simple Idea: just post your photo and don’t bother to bloat it with an ICC profile that a TV can’t understand anyway, and I’ll draw your photo with the crayons of sRGB.

On the Mac, the browsers Internet Explorer and Safari look for an ICC profile (few photos on the net have them) and use whatever box of crayons it specifies. In that case, what you see on your Mac is not what someone sees on Windows, their TV, or the excellent Firefox browser, which many Mac owners use.

It gets worse.

On the Mac, when no ICC profile is embedded in the photo, it uses the crayons of your monitor profile. That is, unless you use Internet Explorer on the Mac and you’ve taken the time to go into preferences and check the box that says use ColorSync. Then IE uses the crayons of sRGB.

On Windows, TV, cell phones, etc., your browser uses sRGB no matter what your monitor profile may be.

It gets worse.

Macs come with monitor profiles that are quite different than the ones on Windows machines. They are lighter, for one thing. Which is why photos look lighter on Macs than they do on Windows, TV, etc.

And that tricks many photographers into receiving darker-than-desired prints. That’s because the same box of crayons (sRGB) that works well on TV also works well for photographic prints using commercial printers, so the sRGB tide has swept all the major ones: Kodak, Shutterfly, Costco, Wolfe’s, Walgreen’s, EZ Prints, whcc, MPIX, Photobox, etc. They don’t know that you’re viewing photos on a Mac and that you think they’re lighter than they really are.

If you’re interested in seeing how your photos look to the rest of the world, you can go to the Apple menu > Preferences > Displays > Color and choose sRGB (it was called TV before the OS X Tiger release). You’ll also need to use the Firefox browser. No sacrifice there — it’s great.

If I say scouting report, you get what I mean fast. A scouting report on a baseball pitcher tells you how fast he throws, which way his curveball curves… Simple.

When I say ICC profile, your eyes glaze and you click over to CNN. But it’s just a scouting report for photos.

The trouble with scouting reports for baseball players is, who has the time to read them? Only the people who make their living hitting home runs. Fans don’t.

The trouble with ICC profiles is, who has time to read them? Consumers don’t. Profiles make it so that small photos download on modems at one-third the speed. Photos are already slow and you can bet sites like CNN won’t slow their sites down by adding profiles.

So the Internet standardized on saving photos one way so that scouting reports aren’t needed. Internet browser software like Internet Explorer and Firefox say, “Eh. Profile schmofile. I’m painting this photo according to the Internet standard and if some schmuck saved it wrong, his loss.” Love it or hate it, the Internet standard is sRGB.

But…but… Color gurus like Bruce Fraser have ranted about the lack of ICC profile support for years. Why?

When I worked for Steve Jobs, I convinced him to give the keynote address at UNIX Expo. We were developing what was to become Mac OS X on top of UNIX, which seemed so powerful a combination — Steve’s legendary ability to make things simple, built on UNIX power.

He didn’t want to go. But the most renowned computer scientists would be there and we believed we had an answer to UNIX’s most vexing problem: it’s usability. Surely they would give Steve credit for trying, no?

He was right and I was wrong. The most talented programmers of the day ripped him for ruining computing, dumbing it down for grandmothers.

I thought it so strange that they could understand the most difficult problems of computer science, but couldn’t see what every pedestrian on the street could see: that simplicity is power.

After years of books and columns about color management, how many people understand it? No more than the people who understand how to use raw UNIX, or less.

That’s why the sRGB tide has swept commercial printers and Internet browsers and why 99% of both ignore ICC profiles even if you embed them.

Hell hath no fury like a photographer who believes smugmug altered their colors. Imagine the frustration: you carefully adjust your photo until it’s perfect, only to post on smugmug and have it look bad.

Here’s an example: the right and left images, below, are the exact same copy of the same photo — one displayed in Photoshop and one in a browser (Firefox):

One possibility is your photo is in a color space other than sRGB, the only one the Internet can display correctly.

The thing is Photoshop knows about color spaces and your browser doesn’t (except for the strange case of two Mac browsers). Your browser bets that everything it sees is in the sRGB color space. And when it loses that bet? Your photo looks awful.

The other reason defies the experts and tortures endless photographers who can’t find the answer: Photoshop (and some other desktop programs) use your monitor profile and your web browser doesn’t. You can think of a monitor profile as a scouting report: it tells Photoshop your monitor is weak on blues, so amp those up, but the greens are too vibrant, so subdue them.

Photoshop bets your monitor profile is the key to displaying your colors accurately. And when it loses that bet? Your photo looks awful.

To make Photoshop and your browser look almost identical, choose sRGB as your monitor profile. Then continue with life. One less thing.

(On the Mac, they called it TV before the Tiger release of OS X because they couldn’t choke out the term sRGB, a Microsoft/HP-inspired standard.)

Here’s how you do it on Windows:

Go to Control Panel > Display > Settings > Advanced > Color Management. You should see a dialog like this one:

Enjoy the newfound harmony between Photoshop and your browser.

But…but… Why did my monitor profile suck? Alas, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the people who wrote it.

Disagree? Have something to add? Post it!

When you think industrial-strength color correction, you think…Photoshop.

Trouble is: time. It takes for-EVAH to get decent color correction with Photoshop. That’s okay for landscape photographers, but what event photographers have the time to Photoshop 500 photos?

And face it: Photoshop’s autocolor is a joke.

Enter i2e, the program I use for 90% of my color correction. When you order a print from smugmug and choose autocolor, it’s going through i2e. And 90% of the time, its autocorrect is better than most people can do manually in Photoshop.

I use the image editor standard edition ($325) from Colour-Science in Switzerland. I don’t need the color management stuff in the pro edition. They have a home edition for $64 — good if you don’t process too many images.

What makes the program so sweet?

1. Rare is the image that fully automatic i2e corrections don’t improve. Photoshop’s autocorrect screws up 50% of images.

2. It does a great job of sensing memory color areas of the photo — sky, grass, and skin — and moving them toward believable values.

3. Manually tweaking is incredibly easy and fast compared to Photoshop curves. You can process hundreds of photos an hour.

What you still need Photoshop for: creative things like the bandaid tool to fix blemishes.

What I wish it had: a hover tool + info pallette like Photoshop has so you can see color values at any spot on the photo.

They’ve got a month’s free trial. You gotta try it.

Disclaimer: I’ve never even met them and don’t get anything for saying nice things about the program.