iPhoto, Elements and colour issues

WE
Posted By
Wendy_E_Williams
Mar 4, 2004
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95
Replies
3
Status
Closed
My set up is G4 iMac (CRT Screen) OS 10.3.2

My workflow is Camera to iPhoto, then any that need editing iPhoto to desktop, Edit in Element, then save to desktop and upload to iPhoto. To make it easy lets say jpegs all the way.

I use my own calibrated colour profile and if I have the same image on screen in Preview, iPhoto or Elements (or indeed the image on a website) then the colours are all the same.

Something strange has happened since I upgraded to iPhoto4 and OS 10.3.2.

If I download a photo from iPhoto to the desktop, open it in Elements do nothing to it except "Save As" … then when I upload it back into iPhoto there has been a colour shift compared to the original photo (the new one is much darker).

But If I download a photo from iPhoto to the desktop, open it in Elements do nothing to it except "Save As" and uncheck the existing Embed Colour Profile (sRGB IEC61966-2.1) then when I upload it into back iPhoto the colours are the same as the original.

All three photographs (jpegs) look identical in Elements and Preview.

Couple of things:

Has anyone any idea what is going on?

Is there anyway of making Elements default to my own calibrated profile? … otherwise it is going to get very complicated.

Sorry this is such a long one but its hard to explain 🙂

Wendy

Just as a side point I have now discovered that … For jpegs I imported to iPhoto prior to the two update this does not happen. What happens then is the original and the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile jpeg are the same but the one done using the "unchecking the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile" becomes lighter on import back to iPhoto.

Once again all three jpegs look identical in Elements and Preview
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WE
Wendy_E_Williams
Mar 4, 2004
I am going away for a few days … so if anyone has any ideas for me I will catch up with you next week.

Wendy
SS
Susan_S.
Mar 5, 2004
Wendy – what colour mangement settings do you have in Elements? It sounds as though iphoto and Elements are reading the colour profile of the images differently.. It may be to do with the way iphoto reads the EXIF tag which on most cameras is sRGB – if Elements and iphoto are doing this differently it would give problems – for example if you have the ignore exif plugin installed in Elements but iphoto4 reads the EXIF tag (I dont think iphoto2 does).
I did noticed that when I upgraded from 10.1 to 10.3 the options in the new version of image capture were giving me problems (I import that way rather than through iphoto) – the default settings tag the images with a profile based on the EXIF data of the camera – I was very puzzled when I suddenly found that the ignore EXIF plug in suddenly appeared not to be working and I had to reimport a lot of files to get them onto my system without the profiles attached – luckily it’s easy to change the options in image capture and I hadn’t deleted the photos from my CF card. It might be worth checking out the preference settings on iphoto and image capture as the old and new files are reacting differently.

Another option to avoid brightness shifts going from unmanaged to color managed apps – reprofile to a gamma of 2.2 (the Windows standard) – sRGB uses this gamma and while you might get a slight colour shift if your camera images were not in this colour space to start with (mine aren’t quite) it means you don’t get any really dramatic surprises…
WE
Wendy_E_Williams
Mar 5, 2004
Hi Susan,

When I was using 10.2.6 I installed the ignore EXIF plug in but it made no difference at all to my images so I removed it. Sounds like it may be worth installing it again.

Regarding the gamma … my own profile is already set to 2.2 and if I have the same image on screen in Preview, iPhoto or Elements (or indeed the image on a website) then the colours are all the same. The problem seem to arrive only when I download images from iPhoto then resave them in Elements and upload again to iPhoto.

Must dash as we are off now but will speal to you when I get back Wendy

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