Profile changing from sRGB to Generic RGB.

RK
Posted By
Ronald_Kimball
May 16, 2004
Views
1486
Replies
6
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Closed
I’m tweaking some photos that I downloaded from my camera to my Mac. I have some older photos downloaded using Image Capture under OS 8, and some newer photos downloaded using Image Capture under OS 10.

Looking at the EXIF data in Elements, all the photos show a color space of sRGB. When I Save As… for one of the older photos, the Color checkbox is "Embed Color Profile: sRGB IEC61966-2.1". However, when I Save As… for one of the newer photos, the Color checkbox is "Generic RGB Profile".

Why isn’t Elements preserving the sRGB profile on the newer images? Will having a generic RGB profile cause problems for the newer photos?

Camera: Canon PowerShot G2
Elements: 2.0

thanks,
Ronald

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BB
brent_bertram
May 16, 2004
Ronald,
You may be getting confused by the EXIF colorspace info as opposed to having an image tagged with a colorspace in the file header. EXIF info can only be "sRGB" or "uncalibrated" in the colorspace slot. It’s a very immature and inaccurate standard .

Some cameras can actually imbed a colorspace (sRGB, AdobeRGB, etc ) in the image . It’s possible that some of your other files have the "generic RGB" colorspace imbedded and Elements is respecting that.

Look for a small black triangle at the lower left of your elements screen and click on it. It should give you the option to display the document profile in the bottom status bar. This will tell you what profile has been assigned to each image, or untagged image.

Hope this helps,

🙂

Brent
RK
Ronald_Kimball
May 17, 2004
Thanks, that is helpful! All the photos were taken with the same camera. Could Image Capture be affecting the color profile? Should I be sticking with the color profile that is in the file? Unfortunately color management always seems over my head.

thanks,
Ronald
BB
brent_bertram
May 17, 2004
Ron,
I’d stick with the profile imbedded in the file. Indeed, Capture could well be imbedding a profile .
For my part, I use the IgnoreEXIF utility to ignore the sRGB info from my camera, and open the images as AdobeRGB in Elements. The images sometimes appear too rich in color, so I tone them down, but AdobeRGB is a better color gamut match than sRGB for printing, and probably closer to your camera’s true colorspace than is sRGB. The only time I’d recommend the sRGB space is for users printing to HP Photo printers, since the HP driver assumes sRGB data and can give some funny results if other profiles/colorspaces are imbedded.

The problem with digicams , as opposed to scanners, for example, is that the quality of light varies immensely in photo shoots, while a scanner has a predictably constant light source. That makes the scanner relatively easy to profile, and a camera rather hard to profile accurately. Here’s a product review by Ian Lyons’ on a camera profiling utility. The review shows some of the issues associated with digicam profiles.
<http://www.computer-darkroom.com/incamera/incamera.htm> .

There’s some pretty interesting reading at <http://www.normankoren.com/color_management.html> . Norman’s whole site can be a treat, but a little overwhelming as well.

🙂

Brent
SS
Susan_S.
May 17, 2004
Image capture can indeed embed profiles – there’ s an option (not in the preferences but if I recall correctly in one of the pull down dialogues on the download screen – I’m a little hesitant to plug in a CF card to check exactly where at the moment having just fried one of mine!) for attaching colorsync profiles to the downloaded files. I got a suprise when I switched from 10.1 to 10.3 as all of a sudden the updated version of image capture had decided to tag all my images according to the EXIF sRGB tag. I had to switch this off to return to what I wanted which was untagged images, but you can obviously switch this on if that’s what you want to do.
Susan S
BB
brent_bertram
May 17, 2004
Thank you, Susan ,
I’m mighty reluctant to give any advice on the MAC platform ( too much ignorance <G> ) .

🙂

Brent
RK
Ronald_Kimball
May 18, 2004
Thank you both, you’ve been very helpful!

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