Why does my colour look washed out?

When I finally found my photography bug I quickly wanted to find a place to dump my shots. I quickly found my way to flickr and haven’t left since. However, it was a close call, because I was initially frustrated that my shots that I viewed on my harddrive that looked vibrant in colour looked all washed out after uploading to flickr.

I did what any right thinking guy would do and blamed the tools, in this case flickr. It was only digging around online that I realised that it was really my fault as I had made a bit of a boo-boo.

Colour profile

Go look up the term color profile on wikipedia and see if you can make any sense of it! Sadly this gobbledygook is really rather important. When you want to print a photo out professionally the printer will usually allow you to download their printer’s colo(u)r profile. It’s these settings that are embedded into your shots that tell the printer how the colour should look. e.g. how red the colour red should be.

It turned out that I had been fiddling with my camera settings and switched it onto the Adobe RGB (1998) profile. Whilst this works nicely for many printers, it doesn’t work nicely for web browsers. Yes web browsers also need to be told how colours should appear on screen.

How to adjust

Most post processing tools will allow you to convert your shot into a different colour profile. For the purposes of my explanation I’m going to be using Photoshop CS3.

1. Open up your shot in CS3

2. Click on Edit -> Convert to profile

3. You should get the window below. Ensure that your “Source space” Profile reads sRGB IEC61966-2.1 If it doesn’t then you need to select it from the “Destination space” profile listing as follows:

4. Click OK and then resave your photo.

5. Reupload to the web and see the results

Depending on your shot you will notice a subtle/large change. In the before and after shot below you can see that in the after shot the colour (especially the blue) is much more vibrant