Color management

Q&A about the latest versions
erik leeman
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Actually Flash/non Flash colour issues aren't just limited to wide gamut displays.
This collage shows what a bad (but previously unnoticed) ICC profile on my old Toshiba laptop did to one of the pages on my website:

Image

Here's a link to the 100% sized screenshot collage: http://www.flickr.com/photos/erik-nl/40 ... 3/sizes/o/

It shows how on this particular laptop Flash object movies (the spheres) stand out from their JPEG backgrounds in profile-aware browsers like Firefox and Safari. Removing the faulty profile made the ugly effect disappear, but it was a lesson learned!
There is always a chance that visitors of your website or your clients have a similarly f****d-up computer, and they'll most likely think it was you who did a bad job.

Erik
acer4x
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AlainC -
The latest version of Flash does not change my view, the sky still appears as it should (blue). This plus Erik's observations seem to indicate that it is your monitor profile that is introducing the shift in color. Can you recalibrate and try again?
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AlainC
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Here is a screen copy, pano is left, image right :
Image
I hope I don't take too much of your time but a last thing I ask is your calibration parameters, I use with Spyder3Pro gamma 2.2 and 6500 K
Thanks
acer4x
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I use the same - 2.2 gamma and 6500K. Select to manually adjust the RGB Sliders in your 2408WFP controls for the calibration process, the Eye One which I use allows for this as does the Spyder. Hopefully this will only need to be done a few times and then your monitor will be all set for the automatic calibration method in future calibrations. The 2408 is a pretty good monitor but it definitely needs detailed calibration to get started as mentioned above.
If you have any more questions do not hesitate to ask and please let us know if this solves your problem. Good luck.
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AlainC
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I totally agree with you about 2408 and the calibration process is the same with Spyder : adjust RGB with onscreen menu and let sensor do its work. I have done it again from scratch and nothing changes.
acer4x
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Alain - on the screen shots you posted, do you see a green sky for the pano? I see blue on my Dell and it is consistent with the way my image looks when I softproof it using my monitor profile in PS when I switch from the sRGB profile. The blue becomes a richer hue.
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AlainC
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I don't know if green is the right word, it is a feeling, but you should see on the screen shot that the sky has a different color in the pano than in the jpg. If I softproof the jpg in PS I have same result as you. My understanding is that in Firefox the color profile is managed for jpg but not for Flash.
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AlainC
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For those interested in that topic here is DELL2408WFP profile :
Image
and here sRGB profile :
Image
As you can see these explains while without color management the image looks more green.
After some investigations I found that my problem was not related to Pano2VR, even simple Flash Gallery of jpg images fail.
Flash on Mac OS 10.6.2 is the issue.
Thansk to acer4x and Erik, I will come back to this thread if I get some info from Adobe.
RyeBrye
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Oct 10, 2010 5:41 pm

In Pano2Vr 3.0 can you add a feature where if an input image has a profile other than sRGB it would prompt the user and (ideally) allow them to convert it using a standard colorsync method (i.e. perceptual / saturation / absolute colorimetric / relative colorimetric...) to sRGB before it was output - or at least notify the user that sRGB is needed if you want your flash panoramas to look the way you expect?

I've currently adjusted my workflow to spit out 16-bit sRGB TIFF's before I load them into Pano2VR - but I do all my editing in ProPhoto RGB first and for the first while I was working with Pano2VR all my panoramas came out with pretty dull looking colors (but they weren't so far off that it seemed unreasonable - just looked very unsaturated)

Having just a warning about the profile would help new users at least be aware that their colors might not look correct.
Werner
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Joined: Tue Feb 10, 2009 6:11 pm

AlainC wrote:It is 2408WFP, sorry for the typo.
Do you mean you have the exactly the same color of sky for image and pano ?
On my monitor the pano sky is much greener.
Hey Alain, I'm with you – having exactly the same problem with my panos – it would be great if there's a solution because it nervs!
What I do is working in sRGB-space, with disabling all profiles and do not embed a profile for the «web-file».

Regards, Werner
steve_hoge
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2011 12:04 pm

My Pano2VR profile problem manifested in oversaturated colors. I'm using a fully color managed workflow with a profiled and calibrated Dell U3011 monitor and this toolset:

MacOS 10.6.8
Apple Aperture 3.2.2 (exporting images according to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 by default)
Pano2VR 3.1.2 Cocoa 64-bit
Safari 5.1.2
Chrome 5.0.375
Firefox 9.0.1 (with gfx.color_management.mode=1)
Flash 11.1 plugins in all browsers.

These browsers are all color-managed (when Firefox is set correctly) and the oversaturated rendering of Pano2VR output is essentially identical in all these browsers under both HTML5 or Flash. They all apply the sRGB profile to untagged images (actually, Safari applies the monitor profile in 10.6.8, which in my case is not too far from sRGB) but with my workflow this results in oversaturation.

The problem may be that Pano2VR ignores the ICC profile that Aperture embedded in the original input file and outputs its files assuming the Adobe RGB model - and without any embedded profile tag. This probably works fine if you were using Photoshop and its default Color Settings; however, I was using Aperture and outputting sRGB.

I was able to work around the oversaturation effect in two different ways, one or the other of which some users may find applicable:

1) Initially, I simply took the cube face image jpegs output by Pano2VR and applied the Adobe RGB profile to them using Preview's "Assign Profile..." command. This resulted in HTML and Flash browser rendering that matched what I had originally created in Aperture (since these up-to-date browsers correctly render tagged images.)

2) Aperture allows individual image export presets which have different ICC color profiles applied. So as a better alternative, I created a preset especially for outputting images to Pano2VR which embeds the Adobe RGB profile in the image, and more importantly renders the output following the Adobe RGB model. When Pano2VR outputs its untagged files using that same model, the results match what I see in Aperture.

BTW, I found this ICC browser test page at Color.org useful for verifying that my browsers were up-to-date and that Firefox's color management parameters were set correctly.

-Steve
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soulbrother
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An old story, but it seems that we meet still the same problems, right?

For me I have a well working color management under WIN7 64bit with an Eizo CG245W.

I output always sRGB Format (RAW-> TIFF from Lightroom).
PTGUI is next, the Equi is retuched in PS CS5
..still sRGB...

next: Pano2VR (V4.1 and 4.5beta)->output flash and html5 (both as multiresolution, but seperate folders to enable transitions in flash).

Finally the flash shows stronger colors (more saturated) as the html5 version.
This happens also, when the same set of tiles is used (when the "internal" flash fallback player is active)

Is there any workaround, or is that on any todo list for any next version?
Or is it technically not possible for Thomas to find a solution?
Is there something that I can modify in my workflow, or will that color difference still be visible in any case of workflow?

Thanks to all!
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