Ok, I was wrong… well, nearly
Its been an almost permanent on-and-off gripe of mine that pics uploaded to Flickr get their colour changed. Well, thanks to a mate of mine commenting on a previous post and offering a damn good suggestion (dunno why I’d not thought of doing this before) I decided to conduct a coupla little tests.
This was the image I embedded from Flickr (as mentioned in aforesaid post)…
And this was the image I exported from Lightroom as a JPEG, and have now uploaded direct to here…
Sure, there is a difference, but nowhere near as much as I’d thought there would be. So apologies to Flickr for a start. Though its obvious the colours are changed a little bit, so I wasn’t totally wrong.
However, the colour (principally the blue) still isn’t right, nor as it looks on the original pic in Lightroom. So, back to Lightroom and desaturate the blue a bit, and I end up with this. Which is much closer to how the blue actually looks “in the flesh” (though its still not quite “spot on”)…
Spot the difference?
Anyway, that set me to thinking and I began to wonder whether that colour management plugin I installed to Flickr ages ago (see this post) had anything to do with this annoying behaviour. So I disabled it and restarted Firefox.
And whaddya know… the blues in the top two pics now look fairly close to how they should be whilst the bottom one looks totally naff!
So it was that so-called “colour management” plugin after all.
Come to think of it, I have a vague recollection now of mentioning (shortly after I’d installed and tested it) that it seemed to enhance colours somewhat.
Hmm. So what do I do? Re-enable the plugin and press on as normal, or uninstall it and go back to the way I used to work? Decisions, decisions. Oh blast!
Your eyes must be better than mine… I had to study the pictures long and hard to see the difference.
I suppose it’s time I visit the eye dr again.
Heh heh. In the one embedded from Flickr there’s also a slight loss of detail in the shadows, plus it seems to have been sharpened a bit… look at the cop’s hat and that doorway and you’ll see what I mean. Also, the differences are quite noticeable with that woman on the far left holding… well, I don’t know quite what it is she’s holding.
I think the second image (the original upload to Flickr) is darker and the colours more saturated. I was so focused on the blue of his kit that I didn’t bother to look over the rest of the picture at first.
After looking around more of the image it becomes clear that you were right in that Flickr does something. But did it really?
Your further research and experimentation leads one to believe that it is the browser itself (itself or in conjunction with the colour management plugin) that is creating the difference and not necessarily Flickr at all.
Of course, I don’t know why a colour management plugin would have any impact on the apparent lightness/darkness of the image.
Well, Flickr definitely does something to uploads, but the mods aren’t quite as dramatic as I’d originally thought. Certainly not sufficient to worry about at least.
But re the plugin, I’ve now made my mind up and am pressing on without it.