Difference in color and saturation between Rawtherapee preview and exported JPG

Hello everyone,
I’d like to ask about noticeable difference between preview in RawTherapee and an outcome JPG. Why it’s occuring?

As you can see, there’s a huge difference in highlights color and red saturation.
I compare it with Windows image preview and Opera browser.

Looking forward your tips! :slight_smile:

Windows photo viewer is not color managed, and I doubt that opera is either.

Find a photo viewer that is color managed, like xnview.

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how would I be able to avoid this? maybe my setting the output to sRGB in RT?

You just need a viewer that is color managed. sRGB might get you close, but it also might not :slight_smile: dunno what those non color managed apps do behind the scenes, but you want control, and thus color management.

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thanks!

Thank you, guys for the answers.
I was trying to find the differences by my own and results are quite interesting.

On the previous screen, in the preview there is an image screened in sRGB profile. On the right, there are JPGS in RTv2 color profiles screened in deafault color settegins in my computer.

I’m green on that, and quite confused, so I need to figure out how to set it for my purposes, but as I’ve seen following settegins do well in browsers and mobiles:

  • preview in sRGB
  • exporting in AdobeRGB color worspace and sRGB colors profile

Hope that for someone else it might be useful.

I normally use Firefox to preview my images because it has colour management, though I am fairly sure it isn’t working 100% in my win10 setup, but I think it is close enough.

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If you don’t know what you’re doing then leave those settings alone at their default values.

You won’t find anything beyond wild guesses if all you provide are cropped screenshots. More info is needed, see How to write useful bug reports - RawPedia

Calibrate/profile your monitor, set the RT preview to use the monitor profile, use the default RT Working Profile (ProPhotoRGB) and us the Output Profile as relevant to your output: if it’s for web, use one of the sRGB profiles.

Windows Photo Viewer is colour-managed but Windows Photos isn’t (it doesn’t respect the monitor profile). If you calibrate/profile your monitor, the profiling program should take care of setting the system-wide CM setting for your display. I don’t know about Opera, but I use Firefox and set its colour management policy to respect my monitor profile (type about:config / gfx.color and change the mode to 1 – it will work for everything except video).

Image viewing programs, even if they “support” color management, have their implementation of color management broken in all sorts of ways. If there’s any suspicion that color management could be the issue, then compare RawTherapee’s preview to… RawTherapee’s preview. With the Editor in METM mode, open the raw image in one tab, save it, then open the saved image in another tab.

To clarify: in order for WPV to work correctly on Windows you need to set up the system colour management settings for your monitor (OP could post a screenshot of his settings), and then tell RT to use the System Default setting for its preview. Additionally, if you calibrate / profile your display, you have to use matrix-only ICC v.2 monitor profiles, because WPV doesn’t like LUT+matrix monitor profiles.