New pictures look fine on my computer, terrible online

[Armitage]

OK, when I take a picture;
it looks great on the back of the camera,
it looks great in Fastpictureviewer.
it looks great in Lightroom.
it looks great in Photoshop. I save the file as a .JPG.
it still looks great in all of the above programs. No problem.

I upload it to Photobucket or my web page to view online and it looks like all the colors has been toned down. Dull and nearly colorless.
That's where it's being viewed by Internet Explorer. Yet my old pictures (pre Fastpictureviewer install) still look great there, and anywhere they're linked online. So I at first assume Photobucket has done something to it.

If I save my washed out looking picture from the Internet to my computer... it looks fine again with the above programs. Huh?

Only my new photos do this, my old ones look fine everywhere.

An old picture, it looks fine on my computer and over the Internet.


A new picture, looks fine on my computer, looks faded online, but a copy saved off the Internet looks good again.

[Axel]

This is most likely a color space issue. FastPictureViewer and the Adobe applications you listed are all fully color managed and will make proper use of any embedded color profile, as well as your display profile if you have configured one, so the colors will look as they should. This is not the case for most web browsers and many other image viewers (some do, some don't, your mileage may vary).

To publish for the web, make sure the images are converted to the sRGB color space during the export operation. If you use FastPictureViewer's built-in batch file processor to create your web-ready copies with the Save for Web action, the color space issue will be automatically taken care of.

The application you use to export your images to the JPEG format certainly has a setting somewhere which let you specify the color space of the exported images. Always make sure to use sRGB (aka sRGB IEC61966-2.1) when exporting for web use, and the color discrepancy issue should disappear.

In Photoshop you can use the File->Save for Web & Device... command (make sure the Convert to sRGB option is checked) or you can use the Edit->Convert to Profile... command before saving as JPEG.

[Armitage]

Yup, all fixed. Thank-you, I never would have figured that out.