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Brian Switek is a science writer who focuses on paleontology, evolution, and the history of science. He also blogs for Smithsonian magazine's Dinosaur Tracking.
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Category: Cats • Photography
Posted on: August 8, 2008 7:15 AM, by Brian Switek
For those of you who know more about photography than I do, I have a question. I've been shooting in the raw NEF format and many of my photographs have come out looking very vibrant. When I convert the image to a format I can use on the web, however, (like jpg) they lose much of that great color and take on a sickly shade of green (like the ones above, unfortunately). Do you have any recommendations about how to convert NEF files to a web-friendly format without sacrificing too much quality?
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Comments
I assume you're converting it in photoshop? Here's the BIG issue - with the exception of Safari, most browsers don't handle the color space you saved it in. In Firefox 3, you can turn on color space support, but you have to do it manually - it doesn't ship out of the box on with color support. In any case you probably want to shoot with your camera set to Adobe RGB space and then convert and save into sRGB space. After that....you have some alternatives...
* Tell people to use Safari or Firefox 3 with color profiles on - see http://pixsylated.com/2008/06/color-management-in-firefox-3/ for info on how to turn on color profiles
* Adjust the gamma correction - I use the curves dialog in photoshop and drag the midpoint just a smidge down to the bottom right. (is smidge a word?). Not as effective or accurate, but keeps the red, and gives you that punch you're looking for. Save a copy, don't gamma correct your original!
Drop me a mail if you continue to have issues :-)
Ashok
Posted by: Ashok Khosla | August 8, 2008 8:04 AM
I have yet to work with RAWs, but a quick and dirty way might be to resize the image to how you want it for the web and then do a screen grab and paste that into your photo editor and save as jpg.
Posted by: mlf | August 8, 2008 9:16 AM
It's the color settings in photoshop that's the culprit. In the program, go to edit/color settings or hit ctrl+shift+k to bring up the panel. Change it to sRGB [letters and numbers]. Then try again.
:)
Posted by: Ahlonzo Riley | August 8, 2008 5:01 PM
Thanks for all the advice, but, truth be told, I don't have Photoshop. It is waaaaay too expensive and I don't think I'll be able to get my hands on a copy anytime soon. I do most of my image editing with Microsoft Digital Image Pro 10 which was kindly sent to me by a friend, but it's nowhere near as powerful.
Posted by: Laelaps | August 10, 2008 5:42 PM