Invalid Color Management in Lightroom? (RAW)

Question

I've noticed the strange thing, how Adobe Camera RAW 4.1.1 displays the same image differently in Photoshop CS3 & Lightroom 1.4.1
Here are the screenshots from both programs:
What I've got in Lightroom/develop mode:
http://www.imagebam.com/image/956c3d6537871
What I've got in Photoshop:
http://www.imagebam.com/image/17a67c6537874
Notice the reds on the face and oranges on the trees on the background. 1) Face on second, photoshop variant is more reddish. 2) The contrast differs as well!
3) There is more orange on the leaves on the second image.
That's all happens in the preview in Lightroom - if I export image as a JPEG and open it in Photoshop - the images will be the same. But BEFORE the export they're DIFFERENT! What's wrong?
(Image is shot on Sony Alpha 350, white balance and all the settings in Camera RAW are the same in two programs).

Answer 1

>yes they are, but in practice PDF causes lot's of bugs.
My experience is opposite in that pdf is usually the only thing that actually works for multipage documents and things containing vector graphics. For single page photos of course tiff always works, but there are lots of clueless operators that do not know their behind from a color profile.
>In my experience colors will be different even for an eye of a consumer. On some printers red will be more reddish, on others green more greenish etc. The contrast will differ either. Maybe you and we use different printers. BTW I work on Windows, maybe that's the point.
I have always had basically perfect results. There was a time when Lightroom interacted wrong with printer drivers when you used profiles inside of the program instead of having the printer driver manage for you. This has long been fixed. Of course there are subtle differences between printers and it would be good if Lightroom had some sort of soft proofing to judge this in advance. The differences are usually pretty minor though nowadays.
>Well, Noritsu, as I know, for example, uses its own color management profile, which you cannot tune even in Photoshop. If you use sRGB, it will be ignored, and you'll get a very low contrast print with desaturated color and you have to be there when it's printed to tune it with the lab assistant. Usually they do it themselves ... well... good. I have SOME good experience with Costco. But for many cases I can't get my colors and contrast without being there when it's printed. And it depends on paper - is it metallic, for example, or matte. The picture will be different. The colors will be different. And you can't check it exactly on your monitor being at home, or in office.
I tested this extensively. If you do this right, it is very hard to see the difference between a sRGB print and a print converted to the profile. With well-tuned Noritsus, you get a small difference in oranges, and a tiny difference in greens - independent of the paper you use. This is the whole point of these machines. If you feed them sRGB, they should give you great results. Maybe my local costcos is very good, but I doubt they are very different from other labs. I tried both Matte and Glossy and they both showed the same result. This is borne out by softproofing in Photoshop that shows exactly the same effect. Note that I wrote about using lab profiles with Lightroom extensively and always tell people to use the profile, but in reality it really is not that important.
See for example: http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/2008/05/great-prints-from-labs.html
If you see large differences in contrast and saturation, there really is something wrong with your calibration workflow or your lab. FOr good prints, the only thing they need to do is to turn off their auto color correction, which with most labs you can do automatically in the online submission pages. I should tell you that you do have to judge prints under good lighting. Often these differences are simply caused by one day being sunny and the other overcast when you walk out on the parkinglot and take out your prints. This is not a real difference. Use a good high color rendering index lamp of high color temperature and you will see that they were the same. My local costcos is calibrated by drycreek photos every month and the profile hardly changes at all over time.
>I don't know, Jao, maybe your point in photography is different, and you don't pay so much attention on colors. These things are subjective! Maybe you pay more attention on other components of photo. In my experience it takes lots of time to prepare a 40"x30" photo for print and then it takes more time and money to colormatch it.
Actually my work is almost always about color. Perhaps I don't sweat it as much. I'd really like Lightroom to have some kind of soft proofing though showing how anal I am about color. I don't use costcos for prints larger than 12x18 as they don't do it locally, but I usually use smugmug's lab (EZprints) for the really large prints. They color manage for you and supply a profile that you can soft proof to if you want. They also appear to scale and sharpen the prints somehow. I've always had outstanding results from them and you can send back the images that you don't like at no cost, although I have never had to do that. I also use smugmug for galleries that clients can order from directly. They have always been very happy with the prints.
>And I work in Windows, maybe your Mac does it better, maybe that's the point of my sad story. But Windows is my karma for many reasons.
The point maybe, also, you print every time on the same printing hardware in Costco - that can explain it all.
I have been happy with my costcos and with EZprints, but I doubt that it is much of an issue. As said, I don't use inkjets very often as they are so darn expensive and annoying to operate but I have never had much issue with bad prints. There is no reason why you could not get windows to behave better. The only thing that you need is to calibrate regularly. I have seen on this forum that windows tends to corrupt monitor profiles over time. The issue is always fixed by recalibrating regularly. Once every month should be plenty.