Color display problem

Processing
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I’m uploading a video here of several screenshots of the same image, but shown in different editors/viewers. Firefox, Chrome, and the default Windows viewer (Win11) all show muted/greenish colors as compared to what I originally intended. RawTherapee, GIMP and Irfanview all display the image as intended. You can see the problem here:

In researching this problem, I’m under the impression that my output settings from RawTherapee aren’t correct.

Here are my color settings:

profile settings

And here is the same in the Preferences window.

color settings
color settings1131×794 120 KB

I’m posting both because I’m not sure if they’re redundant, or what.

I’m at a loss to know where to go to correct this problem. I need to deliver some important images, but I don’t want them to show up like they do in the second half of this video. Most people view images in a browser or default viewer. Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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Your working profile should not be sRGB

Seems like your browsers aren’t color managed.

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Thanks for your reply. If not sRGB, what should it be? I’m also guessing the average user doesn’t have their monitors color managed. I’ve just not seen this problem before.

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Your working profile is the color space your edits are made in: https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Color_Management#Working_Profile

Default is ProPhoto for RT, but should be some large gamut space.

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Thanks for your reply. The problem is persisting even by changing to the ProPhoto working space. The colors I’m seeing in RT are not the same as what are showing up in a web browser.

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You can try and switch the output profile to the v2 and see I’d that helps. Not every app is color managed, so its just going to look different.

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Thanks. I’ll keep at it.

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I think it might be your rendering intent…the first ones look like they are honoring relative and the subsequent ones look more perceptual… Your working profile should not impact this comparison…you are taking one exported file and displaying it in different viewers… The last 3 might use the OS settings and that I think for windows is perceptual by default… in any case you could try a perceptual render and then redo the comparison and see if they are now more similar…

1 Like
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Thanks, that actually makes some sense when I look at the rendering options.

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About colour management and ‘most people not having their screen colour managed’.

  1. this is a problem that ‘most users’ do to themselves (meant as a joke).

  2. you need to accept that your image will look different on ALL monitors out there in the world. They all have a different response.

  3. if you use colour management , you have encountered that not every program honours it. This is a problem ‘most users’ do NOT have, if they dont have a profile loaded for their monitor.

  4. the best you can do is take a common default as reference , in this case sRGB (which you have as output with the rtv4_srgb, so :+1:).
    The best monitor makers can do is try to stay close to that. And the best end users can do is profile your monitor and use a colour managed viewer. ‘most users’ don’t so the last bit, so you can only do the first thing. You can’t fix a bad monitor at someone else in the world , or bad settings at someone else in the world.

At your situation, apparently you have a profile active on your monitor that boosts greens quite a bit. So if you look at an image with a viewer that ignores the monitor profile, your greens are muted . If you look at an image with a viewer that honours it, the greens are vibrant.

I’m assuming that rawtherapee is colour managed here and working correctly , and showing the vibrant greens that you actually want (I guess). So your output is OK.

IF YOUR MONITOR PROFILE IS CORRECT (that’s the big question here ), then everything is ok. YOU see muted greens in a viewer without colour management, because that is how your monitor natively displays greens. But if someone was to look at your image with a monitor that is just good in colours , they’ll see the exact same as your rawtherapee view.

You can’t do better than that, you can’t correct for a ‘maybe monitor with terrible response at someone in the world’.

Now, maybe your monitor profile is wrong. And then it’s a different story. But I bet you’ll see it quickly enough when viewing images from other people that their greens are ‘too much’ or something (in a colour managed viewer).

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I still think it’s worth a try since his output profile likely supports intents to go ahead and rerender in RT as perceptual and check again. Relative just has a bit more saturated contrasted look and it looks like it could be a possible source of the issue… your points are well taken

2 Likes
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Oh for sure ! It could be the easy fix :).

I hardly notice the difference , maybe because I’m seldomly pushing the profile that hard (or the profile isn’t complete and relative / perceptual isn’t doing anything different)

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Thanks for the replies, everyone.

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Ya the DT sRGB that many use doesn’t support rendering… it doesn’t have the lut tables… I would have to go back but I think the one used by the OP does… and your right it is often a very subtle difference…