Iphoto book images too dark!

We have been satified with previous Apple iPhoto books. We are disappointed in the most recent one as the photos are dark throughout. Yes, we have a bright monitor, but have always used the same approach. Photos from other vendors using the same images look correct. Can Apple redo with increased 'brightness'?

And
what color profile do the photos have
Did you preview using this method before ordering -
Before ordering your book preview it using this method -http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1040 - and save the resulting PDF for reference - the delivered book will match it.
LN

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Images too dark on external display

Hello,
I use Lightroom on my (Lenovo) notebook. Because of the small screen size, I tried using it with an external (Samsung) display. However, when I open Lightroom on the external display, all the images suddenly seem way too dark. It is the case that this display is generally too dark, because when I view the same picture in a photo viewer or a browser it is not too dark. See for example this screenshot. On the left hand you see an image (export from Lightroom) in my browser, on the right hand the same image in Lightroom. You can clearly see it is much darker. When I view both images on the screen of the notebook itself, there is no difference between them.
Actually, when I move the Lightroom window from the notebook display to the external display, you can clearly see Lightroom adjusting the images from light to dark.
Does anyone know what causes this, and how I can prevent Lightroom from showing the images too dark?
Thanks!

I guess you misunderstood my problem. It's not only that images on the external display are way darker than on the notebook, but also that on the external display images in Lightroom are much darker than when I view the same image on the same display in a photo viewer or a browser. In the screenshot pictured above both the light and the dark version of the image are on the same external display.
However, in the meantime I found a solution. Changing the Windows Color System device profile to a non-WCS-profile did the trick: Photos appear as black, gray rectangles | Lightroom | Windows
Thanks anyway for trying to help.

My photo book printed too dark

Hi. I ordered a book via iphoto and the pictures were WAY too dark. Is there a contact person somewhere in iworld that I can call about adjusting the heavy ink?

Apple guarantees satisfaction - see - http://www.apple.com/support/photoservices/returns/
What color profile are the photos - sRGB is the best - many people have reported that using adobe RGB causes very dark prints
In general less editing is best - and using iPhoto is better than PhotoShop or other editing programs -- http://www.apple.com/support/photoservices/preparation_tips/
LN

Images too dark? colorsync issue or corruption?

I am not sure if this is related to Aperture, or not, but it is impacting the quality of my experience in Aperture...
I have noticed that my MBP2007 display profile seems too dark, and I think there is some preference or application that is loading at startup that is interfering with it. I am using the default LCD profile for the MBP, and have made sure there are no other profiles selected (selecting other profiles does not appear to change the results in any positive way).
Here is what I have observed: I noticed in Aperture that all my images seemed to need correction for being too dark. This is strange, since my Nikon seems to be taking perfectly balanced photos. So I started to dig around and remove all preferences that were associated with any color application I have used. I restarted and noticed that when the desktop image first appeared (a photo I had taken) it looked like it had the correct tonal range. Also, all the images in Aperture looked correct! However, this was short lived, and now each time when I restart, the process starts the same way, with the image appearing correctly at first, but then, as the menu bar started to appear, the image suddenly became too dark, as though a profile had just been applied! I have looked at the Console log, but cannot see anything that looks suspicious in terms of something that may be loading and interfering with the profile. I have tried to delete colorsync preferences, but have not been able to correct the issue again! Any ideas? I am really stumped by this!
Thanks for any help!

Hmm ... interesting. The ICC type MNTR Monitor profile for the display should be shown in the Devices section of the Apple ColorSync Utility.
A generic ICC profile for the make and model of display is shown as Factory Profile and a measured ICC profile for the specific calibration state of the display is shown as Current Profile.
The ICC MNTR profile shown in Apple ColorSync Utility > Devices > Display > Current Profile should be the same as the one shown in System Preferences > Display > Color.
Apple ColorSync 2.5 introduced the VCGT Video Card Gamma Tag that sets the state of the video system to the state described in the measured profile.
This was - and is - intended to do away with the difficulties caused by competing gamma utilities e.g. Knoll Gamma for Photoshop that tried to take control of the video system on startup.
(selecting other profiles does not appear to change the results in any positive way).
The intention of some who were involved in the ICC architecture was that working space profiles would by type SPAC Color Space, but then Apple and Adobe wanted type MNTR Monitor profiles to do this job.
This produced the problem that type MNTR Monitor profiles have to do double duty, both as monitor profiles in which equal amounts of RGB do not produce gray and as working space profiles in which equal amounts of RGB do produce gray.
So, this is why System Preferences > Display > Color shows both measured monitor profiles and monitor profiles for RGB working spaces such as sRGB, eciRGB, adobeRGB and so on and so forth. If you click a profile that is not your measured monitor profile, you reset the video system.
Instead of resetting the video system, as you may be doing, install a good ICC profiling packing, calibrate your monitor, and characterise that state in a monitor profile that will be automatically installed by your ICC profiling package.
Not all problems are configuration problems, some are bugs too, but if one has a sense of what the different dialogues do and how they are supposed to work together then problems produced by system misconfiguration can at least be eliminated in troubleshooting.
/hh

Images too dark on Samsung monitor - please help!

We've just upgraded a Samsung 21" monitor to a Samsung 30" (305T).
In just TWO applications, Photoshop CS3 and Windows Photo Gallery (Vista64), all photographic images are much too dark. Not subtly, about 3-4 f-stops too dark.
EVERY other of our applications INCLUDING ADOBE BRIDGE AND FIREWORKS, and even Photoshop itself during Save to Web, displays the photos as they should appear.
I've tried setting various profiles in Windows Color Management as the default, including the ICC profile sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (which my reading says we should be using), as well as WCS profiles sRGB virtual and scRGB virtual, and tried using no profile at all. None of these changes makes any apparent difference at all to the images we're seeing.
In Photoshop, I've tried various options too. If set to Monitor Color (Monitor RGB - * wscRGB) Photoshop then displays images as it should. However the Camera Raw display when loading Nikon images is still much too dark, and the Photoshop Save to Web images are much too light. Arrrgh!
The monitor does not include any driver software, just electronic documentation (poorly edited) which offers no advice about this. I've seen references to various Gamma utilities, but not sure that's what I need. Is it?
Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!
TIA

Thanks Peter & Sid. I appreciate the advice, but it doesn't match our experience over 12 years of designing web applications so I'm having trouble understanding what's different, can I ask for any more advice you might have?
If we calibrate the monitor using the recommended tools, will Photoshop images look 2-3 f-stops brighter (i.e. as they should look) and will images in all other apps (which look fine now, have always looked fine) look 2-3 f-stops too bright? Or would we be changing JUST the way Photoshop sees the images?
Through probably a dozen different previous CRT and LCD monitors, we've never calibrated anything. Even on our immediately-previous Samsung 213T monitor, images appear pretty much the same in Photoshop as they do in all other places. That includes published web sites viewed with several popular browsers and viewed on literally hundreds of different systems inside and outside of our office.
The previous monitor was being used with exactly the same software and hardware as the new one. The only thing that's changed is the monitor.
Peter asks about brightness or white point luminance. I haven't used any tool to determine that. The monitor is set to 50% brightness, for whatever that's worth, but I can tell you that it is substantially BRIGHTER on white than the previous monitor. The previous Samsung monitor is being run side-by-side with the new one, and it looks quite dull and yellow beside the new one (and we thought it was a great monitor!) The new 30" Samsung has MUCH whiter whites. Does that help even a little?
Thanks for any further advice.

Canon 1D MkIV images too dark

Hi there
Having a problem here. The RAW images from my Canon 1D Mark IV come in a stop too dark!
When I open them, they lookfine; a second later they switch to a too-dark version. I am using Camera Standard, and no other adjustments.
It's not just visual: the histogram of the opened file is shifter a stop to the left compared to the same phoito's histogram on the camera.
Any ideas? This is a major issue for me since I rely on both the 1D MkIV and Lightroom to make a living...
Many thanks
Michael
www.michaelwillems.ca

Hi M, the question is simple, but the answer is complex. I'll provide an example to try to illustrate. The attached image is a downsampled version of a JPEG from the 1D Mark IV. It's a test picture of a color chart. I've drawn a red circle around the 2nd gray patch in the 4th row. When I take a picture with the 1D Mark IV zoomed into this patch at this exposure, I get a histogram all the way to the right. And indeed, when I open the file in any image editor (e.g., Photoshop, or DPP), and use a color picker / eyedropper to sample the values, the average value of that patch is (255,255,255). So this is like in your example when you say you look at the histogram (e.g., in DPP or on the camera LCD) and it's all the way to the right. In other words, the histogram effectively says this patch is clipped to the max value.
However, if we look at the average raw values in this example for that patch, they are actually (on an 8-bit scale) about (72, 209, 187). In other words, the actual camera-recorded raw values are still pretty far away from clipping to 255. (I should also mention that the camera-recorded raw values aren't white-balanced, which is why the green value is much higher than the red & blue values, above.)
So you can see there is a discrepancy between the camera-produced JPEG and the actual raw values. In this example, the camera histogram and JPEG values indicate a clipped patch at (255,255,255). If you are going by that histogram, then you would conclude reasonably that this patch is overexposed and clipped -- when actually it is not.
More generally, there are always discrepancies / differences between camera-recorded raw values and the histogram shown on the back of the camera (as well as the JPEGs rendered by the camera). This isn't error. This is preference. Cameras and software apply "preset" exposure and tone curve processing (and possibly sharpening, noise reduction, etc.), and the histograms you see on the back of the camera are based on those presets (not the actual raw data). This is why your histogram on the camera will change depending on your in-camera settings of white balance, tone curve, contrast, etc.
There is nothing wrong with the 1D Mark IV. Many Canon DSLRs currently leave a lot of highlight headroom, i.e., when metering they will be conservative on the highlight side, and expose a little less. As I recall (don't have my full notes in front of me), the 1D IV spot meters about 3.5 stops below the actual clipping point. In other words, if I had spot-metered that gray patch in the attached example, and started with the meter needle in the middle, I could then increase the exposure by about 3.5 stops before I actually clip that patch. That's quite a lot.
To summarize: you have to be careful when interpreting camera histograms. In many cases, it is easy to interpret that something is clipped when in fact it is not. If you see a histogram that appears bunched up to the right, the tendency is to decrease the exposure, and therefore make the histogram move to the left (so you aren't overexposing). In reality it is possible the original exposure was fine (without overexposure), and all that's happened is that now the image is even more underexposed.

Gray scale images – too dark

CS5.5 or CC – I have experienced several times that flat grayscale imaged - corrected and nice in PhotoShop turns up much too dark when placed in InDesign.
I make sure no effect or colors are applied to the frame or picture, but still no effect.
If I force transparency on the actual spread (by placing two white items on top of each other, the topmost multiplied on the master page) then it looks correct at once.
It makes no difference if it is a flat grayscale jpg or a psd, even a psd with a white background turns out this way.
Why is that? - Do you know?
BR Nina Storm

ID previews grayscales two different ways, when there's transparency on the page or Overprint Sep Preview is turned on, grayscales preview via the CMYK profile. With no transparency (or an RGB Transparency Blend space) they preview as sGray (2.2 Gamma), which is useful for screen design.
You can use your InDesign document's CMYK profile as the grayscale profile in Photoshop to get more consistent previews between ID and PS. Check this thread:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/6123199#6123199

Grayscale images too dark in InDesign

Hello everyone,
Whenever I place a grayscale image in my InDesign (CS 3) document, it looks far too dark (compared to what I want and what I prepared in Photoshop).
These are the specs of the images: tif, 300 dpi, grayscale, 15% dot gain profile.
I've tinkered with the color settings in InDesign, but nothing seems to change this. Only when I export the InDesign document to pdf and choose 'Convert to destination (preserve numbers) - Working CMYK (Coated Fogra27)' and choose to 'Include destination profile' the photos in the pdf document seem okay again.
What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for your help!
johan

The Gray profile you use in Photoshop gets ignored by ID even if you save it with the grayscale. ID puts the incoming grayscale's values on the black plate unchanged. Using a CMYK profile as the gray space in PS matches ID's color managementthe grayscale previews as it would print on the black plate of a CMYK press. You get a more consistent previewbut it has no affect on output.
The only way you would get a conversion of black or grayscale values to a black+CMY color at output or export would be if the print destination CMYK profile were something other than the document CMYK profile. So if you assign Coated Fogra27 to your document, your printer would have to choose some other profile as the destination printer profile when she outputs separations for black to convert to CMYK.

Images too dark when I watch a movie

Movies almost completely dark. We see less and less. The moniter brightness is at 100%.
It's now to the point that watching a movie is no longer enjoyable.

Hello nicoleeted,
Welcome to the HP Forums, I hope you enjoy your experience! To help you get the most out of the HP Forums I would like to direct your attention to the HP Forums Guide First Time Here? Learn How to Post and More.
I understand you are having issues where when you watch a movie it is too dark and you cannot see it properly. I would encourage you to post your product number for your computer. I am linking an HP Support document below that will show you how to find your product number. As well, if you could indicate which operating system you are using. And whether your operating system is 32-bit or 64-bit as with this and the product number we can provide you with accurate information.
How Do I Find My Model Number or Product Number?
Which Windows operating system am I running?
Is the Windows Version on My Computer 32-bit or 64-bit?
Please re-post with the requested information and I would be happy to provide you with assistance. Thank you for posting on the HP Forums. Have a great day!
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Also be sure to mark my post as “Accept as Solution" if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others who face the same challenge find the same solution.
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Firefox shows images too dark; Chromium does not

I'm running an Arch installation on my laptop, which has an Nvidia GT425M gpu with the nvidia proprietary drivers installed. Firefox renders images noticeably darker than they should be, but Chromium does not have such an issue. I have disabled hardware acceleration on Firefox, but it didn't help. Anyone seen this before or have any advice?

Maybe https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/doc … in_Firefox ?

Photo booth images too dark and grainy

When I use Skype or want to take a photo using Photo Booth, the image is dark and grainy. It has slowly gotten worse and worse. Never had a problem with it before. Any suggestions?

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2090 How to Troubleshoot iSight

Keynote Send to iPhoto creates images too small for iBooks

I like using iBooks, but the layout flexibility is too constraining for what I do. I like to do my layouts in Keynote (because I get freedom of layout, cool themes, and I can them use the Keynote as a presentation) then I send to iPhoto. In the past, this has worked fine and the resolution has been suitable. Now (perhaps with 08) the resolution is about half what it used to be, too low for a good print job. While images used to be on the order of 1.8MB each, now they are 325k to 500k. I'm sure if I order such an iBook, my client will not be pleased with fuzzy text and photos.
I have tried pdf to iPhoto, same results. I've tried export to desktop, same results. I've selected jpeg (highest quality), same results.

Hi Larry,
Thank you for your reply. I apologize for not adding more details. The photo I originally sent as a "large" file was 414 KB. When I switch to "actual" it is 2.3MB which I am assuming will work for the publication. I am only sending one photo at a time – one for each article. Thank you again. I expect the photo editor will let me know tomorrow if they have what they need. Fingers crossed.
By the way, in addition to iPhoto I also have Lightroom but have not had a chance to learn the basics of using it. As of now my entire library is in iPhoto and Picasa.
Thank you again for your time,
Lynn

Projected images too dark

Presenting in mirrored display mode from various software including Vectorworks, iPhoto, Preview, PPT. Some projectors display images (eg in iPhoto) unreadably dark. There is usually no opportunity to test or research the projector before the presentation. Different venues, different projectors, no time to adjust - walk into the room, plug into the projector and start the presentation. Projector brightness control can help some, but images get washed out. Clicking through Mac profiles is usually not possible as the audience waits. Have not tested all, but no good ones yet. Usually in mirror mode because working in the software requires eyes on laptop - Vectorworks, mouse, tool palettes, etc.
Any tips to adjust things for good image quality while the audience looks on?
Would reboot while connected help?
Troubleshooting guides for presenters?
Any help appreciated.
-B

I also have the same problem, which is very annoying, since all my colleagues (using a PC) show nice pictures and videos and mine are just not recognizable! The good display of the MacBook Pro can not compensate for such a flaw, as what counts is how your presentation looks like when you project it.
I have observed this problem many times with different projectors and Macs, so it is a general problem.
I changed the VGA color setting, as well as the projector contrast and brightness but it does not improve things much - objects from such as boxes, lines and text on color look normal, but any picture inserted into the presentation looks very dark and with low contrast (also true for videos). And the nice backgrounds in Keynote just do not look nice any more when you project them....
would be happy to hear some ideas or solutions if there are any

Iphoto kodak prints too dark

I previously had no trouble uploading photos directly from iphoto to kodak, I had not done it in a long time. I uploaded some photos last week and they came back very dark. I use a nikon d70 shooting in camera raw. I did minimal adjustments (iphoto auto exposure mostly) and everything looked fine on the computer screen.
whats the trick?
thanks,
tim

tim:
Check one of the photos by opening it with Preview, type Command+i, and see what color profile the jpg version of it has. You may have to export the jpg version to the desktop to open it with Preview. It the file has the Adobe RGB profile that is probably why they came out darker than expected. You may have to embed the sRGB color profile in it with either Preview, ColorSync Utility or the Applescript that's available for download at Toad's Cellar.
TIP: For insurance against the iPhoto database corruption that many users have experienced I recommend making a backup copy of the Library6.iPhoto (iPhoto.Library for iPhoto 5 and earlier) database file and keep it current. If problems crop up where iPhoto suddenly can't see any photos or thinks there are no photos in the library, replacing the working Library6.iPhoto file with the backup will often get the library back. By keeping it current I mean backup after each import and/or any serious editing or work on books, slideshows, calendars, cards, etc. That insures that if a problem pops up and you do need to replace the database file, you'll retain all those efforts. It doesn't take long to make the backup and it's good insurance.
I've created an Automator workflow application (requires Tiger or later), iPhoto dB File Backup, that will copy the selected Library6.iPhoto file from your iPhoto Library folder to the Pictures folder, replacing any previous version of it. It's compatible with iPhoto 6 and 7 libraries and Tiger and Leopard. iPhoto does not have to be closed to run the application, just idle. You can download it at Toad's Cellar. Be sure to read the Read Me pdf file.
Note: There now an Automator backup application for iPhoto 5 that will work with Tiger or Leopard.

Photo book prints too dark

The large hard cover book I ordered through iPhoto came back way to dark and saturated. What happened to ColorSync and should I expect a better print product from Aperture?

Apple guarantees satisfaction - see - http://www.apple.com/support/photoservices/returns/
What color profile are the photos - sRGB is the best - many people have reported that using adobe RGB causes very dark prints
In general less editing is best - and using iPhoto is better than PhotoShop or other editing programs -- http://www.apple.com/support/photoservices/preparation_tips/
LN

Iphoto book images too dark!

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