Converting Your Images to the sRGB Color Space (Profile) for the Web.


With today's post, I want to explore the subject of posting photos to the web.

If you are new to the prospect of uploading one or more of your images to be viewed

on the internet, you may want to follow this short tutorial to insure that the images
you see on your computer screen (prior to uploading) look exactly the same - i.e. color
quality, after uploading them to the web. Before I learned this method, I know that I was often perplexed with how some of my uploaded images looked compared to how they looked on my computer screen before they were uploaded. They seemed to lack the vibrance of color that I remembered them to have. Well, I soon discovered the reason for this apparent transformation to dullness: I had not converted the images from the Adobe RGB 1998 color space (also known as "color profile", to the sRGB color space (profile). This needs to be done for the simple reason that the Web is unable to "read" the Adobe RGB 1998 profile, so it will automatically try to interpret the colors the best it can, which is usually far short of what your image should actually look like. You can fix this problem easily by always converting your images to the SRGB color space prior to uploading them to the web. This is very easy to do if you are using Photoshop. Here is how it's done:





When you are ready to upload your finished and sharpened (Adobe RGB 1998) image, there are actually 2 different ways to do this in Photoshop. Here is the easiest method:

Go to: File/Save for Web and Devices. The image below shows the dialog box.



If you look on the right side of the dialog box, you will see a box you can check called "Convert to sRGB". Check this box, and after making your other preferences, click "Save".

Your image is now ready to be uploaded to the Web!


"Converted" image.

So what's the second method, you may be asking?

The second method gets the same results, but requires additional steps, which have to be repeated every time you use it. Here is how it works: First, you have to convert your Adobe RGB 1998 image to the "web friendly" sRGB color space. Go to: Edit/Convert to Profile and in the dialog box find "Destination Space" and scroll through the color profiles until you find the sRGB profile and select it. Then Click "OK". Now Go to: File/Save As - then select "jpeg"
as your format. Your image is now "Web ready" and can be uploaded to be viewed online as it was intended to be viewed.

A Final Note:
You can automate this process easily in Photoshop simply by creating and saving an "Action" which will automatically perform these steps for you with one click of your mouse. I will be adding a tutorial on this soon.