Colors in photo changes when uploaded to my blog! Why?

  • stratforduponavon · Member ·

    I shoot in RAW. When I upload the image to my blog, all the colors look washed out – nothing like the original that I can see is much better in iPhoto. I have tried exporting the photo to a high quality JPEG – same thing happens when I upload a nice photo; it looks washed out when I see it online.

    Does anyone have a recommendation to stop this happening please?

    Thanks!

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    Can’t do much without a link to your WordPress.COM blog, starting with http:// so we can see the problem.

    In general, WordPress.COM accepts JPG, JPEG, PNG and GIF. Also resizing your photos to the width of your current theme before uploading makes a world of difference.

  • thesacredpath · Member ·

    We do need a link to your blog, but these guest blog posts I did a while ago might shed some light on the subject for you. Also, make sure you’re saving your images in sRGB. I think iPhoto does that automatically though.

    http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/how-good-is-wordpress-at-resizing-and-resampling-your-images/
    http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/image-editing-and-preparation-tips-part-1/
    http://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2008/04/28/image-editing-and-preparation-tips-part-2/

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    One of the forum volunteers has written a post with info about the current maximum image width for the themes on WordPress.COM. You can find it here. http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/maximum-image-width/

  • bellaeats · Member ·

    I am having the same issue. I edit images in iPhoto, Photoshop or Aperture, and resize to 500 pixels wide to fit my theme (cutline). Once the post is live, the images are very washed out. The weird thing is, if I put two safari windows side by side, one showing my live post and one showing the post open in my dashboard to edit, the dashboard images look great and the posted images look awful.

    Here is the particular post I am concerned about: http://bellaeats.com/2009/08/13/bella-terra-blackberry-jam-anyone/

    Any thoughts are very much appreciated, I am pretty frustrated. Thanks!

  • thesacredpath · Member ·

    Make sure you are saving them as sRGB rather than Adobe RGB. Adobe RGB is for print media and will appear washed out on the web.

    Also try this. Insert an image and set it to link to the original (file URL) and the right click on the image on your blog and open it in another window and then compare that with the one in the blog post.

  • tellyworth · Staff ·

    tsp is correct – the problem is the colour space, and using sRGB will fix it.

  • bellaeats · Member ·

    Thank you for your responses.

    I verified that both my camera profile and my export preference out of Aperture are sRGB color profile. I tried uploading the images again, and still see fully saturated images in my dashboard but washed out images in the preview and live post.

    Any other suggestions?

    I am going to try a test post today, with newly edited images, to see if it was just a fluke with that particular post. If I come to any conclusions I will update the forum.

    Thanks again.

  • thesacredpath · Member ·

    All the images in the post you reference are 640 x 427 uploaded size. On the image insert window, it states that the “large” image size is 497 x 331 for cutline. You need to size your images to those dimensions. Even 1px larger in either dimension and wordpress will “resize” your image – or rather ask the browser to do it – which will reduce quality.

  • anniesue · Member ·

    Thanks everyone for a very useful conversation.

    This has been a persistent and irritating problem for me, too. I shoot raw, process as 72dpi jpegs, am within the maximum image width for my theme, and I make sure they’re in sRBG. Yet the colours, especially blues, are not as true when they appear on my blog. Right clicking the image in my live post to bring up the same image in a separate window shows obvious differences in hue and contrast.

    Is wordpress monkeying with my colours, or am I still missing something here?

    http://anniesue.wordpress.com

  • justjennifer · Member ·

    Looking at both images on my monitor, the image embedded in your post seems much darker than the same one opened as a separate image. I even ran a histogram on luminosity, red, green, blue, which showed them more or less the same. And then I had a revelation when viewing the image in the center of my monitor in a graphics program.

    Are you using an LCD monitor and does it have saturation differences in certain areas? I’m using a Samsung 731B and the lower part of the screen shows lighter than images higher up on the page. Once I scrolled the image in your post to the same point as the single image on a new page, they were the same visually as well.

    Just a thought.

  • thesacredpath · Member ·

    @anniesue, I’ve noticed that lately even if you upload an image that is the exact size, wordpress seems to be “tweaking” it. This is the code that wordpress created when the image was inserted into your latest post: 

    <a href="http://anniesue.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/20090830-blue-green-scarf2.jpg">
<img class="size-full wp-image-440" width="468" height="311" alt="20090830 blue green scarf2" src="http://anniesue.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/20090830-blue-green-scarf2.jpg?w=468&h=311" title="20090830 blue green scarf2"/>
</a>

    See all the size stuff in the img src section? If you edit the post and delete the image size stuff to where it looks like the below, You will see your image come back to life

    <a href="http://anniesue.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/20090830-blue-green-scarf2.jpg">
<img class="size-full wp-image-440" alt="20090830 blue green scarf2" src="http://anniesue.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/20090830-blue-green-scarf2.jpg" title="20090830 blue green scarf2"/>
</a>

    My suggestion to keep this from happening is to upload the image, get the URL of that uploaded image and then do an insert from URL instead of using the normal image upload thing. This way wordpress should not tweak you images.

  • anniesue · Member ·

    Thank you – you’ve been very helpful. You were right – it’s just that little line of image size code that messes up the colour. I deleted it and like magic, my image was back to normal.

    But what a pain – I don’t understand the code, but it seems that wordpress automatically deletes the caption if I delete the image size bit. But I’d rather have true colour than a caption.

    I wasn’t sure about your explanation of inserting from URL though.

  • thesacredpath · Member ·

    You’re welcome.

    If you are comfortable with removing the size declarations from the code, just keep doing that. WordPress needs to fix that. If you upload an image that is the correct size, they should not mess with it.

  • jsmixonphoto · Member ·

    I have never had an issue with washed out colors until a few days ago. My images all of the sudden seemed washed out. I tried the sRGB thing, but that made them more washed out. Any suggestions. Here is a link to my blog: http://jsmixonphoto.wordpress.com/
    The blues are especially washed out. Thanks in advance!

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