Different colors after exporting

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Different colors after exporting

helmet

Hello!

I use Darktable 3.2.1-8 on Fedora 33, KDE Plasma.

And I spent 2 weeks learning Darktable and finish editing my vacation photos, which didn’t look right after getting on print. So I thought, okay I need to calibrate my monitor.

But later I noticed that if I look at the picture on Darktable and compared it with the same picture on Gwenview. They had different colors.

I even made a screenshot on darktable, and compared the screenshot and exported image in the Gwenview and they showed different light/colors.

Everything I export becomes darker.
I have tested to save as sRGB + imagesettings and other mixes.

The modules I often use are Color contrast, Denoise, Shadows and highlights.

How should I tackle this?

jaw-dt

I’m running dt 3.2.1 on fedora 33, Gnome desktop. The dt darkroom image matches the output image viewed with Gnome image viewer. Have you tried an another image viewer other than Gwenview?

I would also verify dt’s input color profile settings
input color profile – standard color matrix
working profile – linear Rec 2020 RGB.

I do not print my images but for correct color printing, the printer should also be color matched. Your image is being output as RGB (red, green, blue) and most printer are CYMB (cyan ,yellow, magenta and black).

helmet

Thanks, you were right.
I tested Gnome now and it looked better when I compared pictures.
So I returned to KDE and tried with different image viewers and and they showed different.

(I took a screenshot on Darktable and saved as PNG and opened it with different viewers and took screenshots. Then I put all the images as layers in GIMP to compare one by one against the Darktable-screenshot.)

Gwenview & Plasma shoft shell = much stronger yellow and red, blurred.
Eye-of-mate = almost the right colors but a little faint on red and black.
Plasma-image-viewer = almost the right colors with faint black details. I will probably use this.

Any other viewer i should try?

Not sure how to check color profile in Darktable, yet.

jaw-dt

You can find the input color profiles in darktable under the color group, should be there by default. Have no recommendations for linux viewers.

ant0nio

I'm detecting the same problem. It does not seems to be a Gnome Image Viewer's issue to me. Trying to open the image in Firefox gives the same results.

My images have been shot in Adobe RGB color space. So this is the input color profile.

As I can see if I change the input profile to sRGB there is more consistency between the images displayed in the workspace and the ones exported.

MrSteveVee

I cannot help directly as I do not use Linux, Firefox or Adobe RGB, however just one thing to mention just in case you are unsure. Check if your monitor supports AdobeRGB as most do not. This means if you display in AdobeRGB on an sRGB monitor around 30% of the colours will be missing from the displayed image and it will look pretty bad.
Of course if you know what you re doing you can ignore all of this, but if this is all new to you, go back to sRGB until you know more.
As an example even if you have AdobeRGB monitor, if you wish to put anything on the web, you may find that the host cannot support it, and if it does, then 99% of your audience can only display sRGB
If you are shooting with calibrated AdobeRGB monitors and printing on an Adfobe supported CMYK printer then away you go, if not you will need to convert your AdobeRGB into sRGB somewhere down the line and it will cause problems for sure until you sort out a workflow.
Steve.

ant0nio

Thank you for your reply MrSteveVee it's really appreciated.

Although in this moment I'm not, yes, normally use an Adobe RGB display.

Thanks to your message I have been doing more testing, and, contrary to what I was thinking, it this does not seem to be Adobe RGB related...

I made a test with RAW images and I'm having the same issue.

TESTING STEP 1

In the left side you can see the Darktable preview, and in the right side the exported PNG file

Using the automatically assigned working profile linear2020RGB

Using the sRGB working profile

TESTING STEP 2

I tried to close DT and to rename the Darktable config directory /home/my-user/.config/darktable so reopening DT a new flesh config dir has been created.

The interest thing is that now the working profile assigned by default is not linear2020RGB default, but sRGB

As I can see the two images colors are pretty consistent.

After renaming config directory

If this was the problem it was probably due to the DT update I have made in the past.

I'll do more testing in the next days, so if there will be any news I'll post them here.

MrSteveVee

Hi, glad its starting to fall into place, also have a look at these options under darktable preferences to see if they help at all.

darktable Preferences->Color manage cached thumbnails
darktable Preferences->dont use embedded preview JPEG but half-size raw
darktable Preferences->Miscellaneous->method to use for getting the display profile

Steve.