Losing saturation when exporting from 1.3

Question

Hello!
I need some help. I just started noticing that when I export my jpegs from Lightroom that I am losing saturation in my images. What am I doing wrong? Do I need to change my settings to something else?
Is anyone else having this problem?
I am exporting as RGB.
Thanks!
Jen

Answer 1

Chaps,
I'm with Jao on this one.
Here's how it is:
|----------------------| ProPhoto Gamut
|-------------------| Camera Gamut
|----------------| Monitor Gamut
If you're in control of your colour management, you are exporting a ProPhoto file and then transforming it to sRGB:
|----------------------| ProPhoto Gamut
|                |  ^
|                |  |_ "Clipped" data lost in transform
|                |
|----------------| sRGB Gamut
In this case "80% ProPhoto red" maps to "100% sRGB red" and the picture looks right, although it may be clipped. You can't see this clipping on the monitor though. The monitor can't tell the difference between "80% ProPhoto red" and "100% ProPhoto red". You understand I'm making it up with my "80%" and "100%", that's why they're in quotes.
If you're not in control of your colour management, you are exporting a ProPhoto file and then assigning sRGB to it:
|----------------------| ProPhoto Gamut
|                     /
|                    /
|                   /   <- Squeeze down assigning sRGB to ProPhoto pic
|                  /
|                 /
|                /
|----------------| sRGB Gamut
That produces exactly the symptoms you describe. Something that was "80% red" in ProPhoto should map to something "100% red" in sRGB as described above. With bad colour management, one maps "80% ProPhoto red" to "80% sRGB red" and they look nothing like each other.
Note that so-called
color stupid applications - like Preview on Windows, for example - do exactly that.
However, both Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom are not color stupid.
I can easily force CS3 into doing it by a) not embedding the colour space when I save the file and/or b) "applying" a profile instead of "converting to" a profile.
Lightroom does neither of these things by default on my machine.
Your mileage may vary.
Damian
PS I don't work for Adobe.