Hi I’m experiencing an issue lately where my photos look different inside of the application to when I export them. Once I export they come out very red, so in the app I have to compensate by tinting them very green and it has become annoying to go back and forth checking if the colors are accurate after I export. If anyone has a solution to this please let me know. This was never an issue a few months ago so I’m not sure what went wrong. Thank you
Operating system?
darktable version?
From where did you obtain darktable?
Window 11 Home, Darktable 4.4.2 and I got it right from the website
If you reimport the exported jpg, does it look like the raw looked, as it looks in e.g. the built-in Windows image viewer, or tinted in some other way?
I suspect darktable uses a display profile, while the built-in viewer does not.
Can you run darktable-cmstest from the command-line? (Sorry, maybe it’s Linux-only. I’ll check and get back to you.) Sorry, it’s not available on Windows.
What does your colour management applet in the Control Panel report?
And darktable? (Right-click in the ‘gamut horseshoe’ icon.)
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You’re sure you haven’t changed the gamut at the time of export, or having a mismatch between the processing stage and the exporting stage?
When I reimported the jpg into darktable it looks like how it does before the export and do you mean a command inside of darktable?
I am not fully sure what you mean
OK. If the re-imported JPG looks like how the raw (or whatever source image) looks, then it’s very likely you have a colour management problem.
Forget about darktable-cmstest, it’s not available on Windows.
I’ve edited my response above, please check.
What do you use to view the exported JPG (outside darktable)? Windows Photos is not colour-managed, darktable is. That means, if you have a bad display profile, Photos will not be affected by it, but darktable will be.
That was the issue thank you, the display profile was set to system display profile but once I changed it to sRGB websafe the colors are accurate and the same as the export. Thank you!
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What you did is only a workaround:
- other colour-managed applications are also likely broken;
- your display surely does not match sRGB 100%: it may exceed it, or be lacking, but a 100% match is only a theoretical possibility.
sRGB can be a good-enough approximation, but if possible, sort out the colour-management issue.
How can I do so
I calibrated my display using DisplayCal (and a hardware calibrator), and use DisplayCal’s profile loader.
On Linux, I set the ICC in system preferences, and also use a script to force-load it just to be sure. Unfortunately, I don’t know what you can do on Windows (apart from using DisplayCal).
Have you checked Control Panel / Color Management? If you send a screenshot, maybe there’s someone here who can help. But this is not a darktable issue, I think; it looks like a wrong profile is set in your Windows OS.
BTW, the latest release of darktable is 4.6.0. Since you have not updated, maybe you should wait until 4.6.1 comes out, as it’ll contain some fixes, and should not be far away.
Okay I calibrated my monitor a while ago but recently used windows 11 new hdr calibration which i think in turn misconstrued the color profile all together. Just need to figure out now how to get the old color profile back
The profile was already there so I switched it, restarted my computer, and it all seems to be working great now. I didn’t know doing the HDR calibration in windows would create a new color profile but I guess I’m better to trust the calibration I did a while back. Really appreciate you taking the time to help me figure it out. Cheers mate
I calibrate my display…I have a device to do so I am lucky in that respect. Then I set that manually in the OS and in all apps. So for DT I copy that profile to my config folder in a sub folder called color out and then set that from DT as @kofa showed you above… I also only use a viewer that I can set the color profile… in my case XNview… Windows Photo viewer in Win 11 is crap… So basically I don’t rely on setting it in the OS (even though I have carefully done so) and using the “system profile” as the setting but rather I explicitly identify what profile I want used… This way I know or hope to know that there are no mismatches …