A little problem with color profiles

Question

I am trying LR and so far I love it, it has successfully replaced RSP for me, and also beat Bibble which I briefly considered but didn't like due to the weird UI.
However, I have a little problem with colours, which has never happened so far with other converters, and I am hoping you can help me to solve it.
My monitor is calibrated with the Spyder and the appropriate profile loaded in the video card.
When I work on a RAW image in LR, and then export a sRGB JPG, and then open it with a browser, or the Win viewer, I see it redder. If I open the image in Faststone, I see it almost sepia.
If I export a TIFF and open it in PS, I see it as in LR, but when I export a JPG from PS (this is my typical workflow), the resulting image has the same problem.
Considering that my entire workflow is in sRGB, can anybody coach me as to the correct settings I must use in order to obtain a final sRGB image with the same colors as in LR? I think that I must be doing something wrong, as the program behaves consistently with PS.
Thank you in advance for any help you will be able to provide.
Andrea,
from Italy

Answer 1

Funny how it's only Windows users that have this 'problem'.
This is not a 'problem' at all. The only 'problem' here is that you've been used to using non-color-managed applications. Suddenly, Lightroom comes in as a mature, color-managed, program... and you're all going bonkers.
Mac users aren't going bonkers because we're used to using color-managed applications (Preview, Safari, etc. are all color-managed on a Mac).
Let me clarify for you that by 'color-managed', I mean that the software is *not only* reading the embedded profile in your image, but is *also* converting, on-the-fly, the RGB values of that image to a new set of RGB values that compensates for the native response of your monitor. Say, for example, your monitor only displays a narrow gamut of reds. Chances are, then, that LR or PS will intelligently compensate for this by saturating reds before sending to your monitor. This is how color management works. You can now imagine the disastrous effects that a bad/inaccurate monitor profile might have...
Your Windows applications, such as 'Viewer', use the Microsoft ICM 2.0 API. This *will* read the embedded profile in an image, but instead of converting to your monitor profile for output, will simply convert to sRGB. That's basically like half-a$$ color-management. Read more about it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/prork/prdn_img_vkev.ms px?mfr=true
Firefox & IE don't even use the ICM 2.9 API, making them entirely non-color-managed. Whatever the raw RGB values are in your image, these applications spit out at your monitor.
It's very important you understand these simple concepts before proceeding any further.
OK, ready?
The original monitor profile that came with my MacBook Pro (profiled by someone over at Apple generically for all MacBook Pro LCDs, I guess) really seems to have underestimated the gamut of my monitor. Hence, color-managed applications compensated for this be resaturating my images (especially in the oranges/reds) before outputting to monitor. Therefore, images looked really nice and saturated in color-managed applications; however, when I exported them to sRGB JPEGs and then uploaded to the web, they looked desaturated (in Firefox, NOT in Safari, since Safari is color managed). They even looked desaturated on other people's monitors (these 'other people' were your average Joes...).
I then profiled my monitor using an i1 colorimeter. A 3-D plot of my monitor profile now showed that it actually had a much larger gamut than what Apple had predicted in their profile (but this gamut was still much smaller than sRGB, or the gamut of my Dell LCD or Sony CRT, etc.). Therefore, now, LR and PS, using this new profile, showed images much less saturated. Now when I made my edits, and then exported to sRGB JPEGs, images looked slightly *more* saturated in non-color-managed applications and on other people's computers.
So, you see, your monitor profile affects how you make adjustments/edits in color-managed programs. If your hardware profiler profiled your monitor incorrectly (which I assume is the problem here), then you may be over-saturating certain colors within LR, skewing those RGB values so that a non-color-managed program, which will not re-correct these values as LR is doing, will display the image with too much, say, red.
Bad monitor profiling also explains why you see this problem only on certain images/colors... if it were a LR problem, you'd most likely see it on every export. The color variance is more than likely due to a bad monitor profile that is not accurately describing your monitor's native response... hence LR/PS are incorrectly adjusting your images before sending to the monitor.
And at this point, please don't resort to saying "but the colors in the web browser look 'right' and LR looks 'wrong'". This statement has no meaning, as what looks 'right' to you in your web browser might look horrible to someone else with a different monitor. The point of color-management is to minimize these differences. For example, I was very unhappy by how desaturated my images looked on the web compared to in PS before I calibrated my monitor. Now, images look slightly *more* saturated on the web than in LR/PS, which I'm OK with. *Should* they look the same? Heck no. Similar? Yes. Is it better if they do look the same after hardware profiling? Yes, if your main goal is web export, but, keep in mind, the only way they *would* look the same after PROPER hardware profiling would be if your monitor happened to have a very sRGB-like response (to explain this would take another few paragraphs... but you should be able to figure it out if you ponder a bit).
I hope this is making sense. Let me ask you a couple questions now:
1.) For your headshot image, IMG_8860, which colors look 'right' to you -- the colors in LR, or the colors upon export (i.e. the headshot on the left or the right in your link above)?
2.) How exactly did your profile your monitor? Was it in the dark? I had quite a bit of variance in my monitor profile depending on whether or not the Mac OS X dock was visible at the bottom of the screen -- the light from the dock leaked into the colorimeter which then led to profiles that generated yellow/green color casts.
-Rishi