Ignore Exif and Elements colour management

[Susan S.]

Thanks Stephen - you are confirming (I think!) the conclusions that I had come to via experiment in my long-winded fashion. Elements also shows the images from both my digicams as tagged with sRGB from the Exif data, unless I do something about it. And in Elements it is more confusing as colour management processes are even less transparent than in the full version - I think it's one of those things that by trying to simplify for non-experts, it's actually made it more complicated for anyone who wants to look under the hood and see what happens...
Susan S.

[Hans Spicar]

I have recently experienced similar problems after buying a new digital camera. My former camera worked perfect with both iPhoto and Photoshop Elements 2 but the new Olympus C8080 gave me poor colours. The camera does tag the files with sRGB but does not include the profile. Not even the included Olympus software handles this.

Experimentation a couple of days gave the following conclusions:
1. There is no visible difference in how Photoshop Elements 2 works with or without the ignore exif plugin.
2. Image Capture (included in Mac OS X) can embed a profile of your choice.
3. The real colour space of many cameras is bigger than sRGB. By embedding Nikon Bruce RGB 4.0.0.3000 I get much better results. Nikon Bruce RBG is somewhere between Adobe RGB 1998 and sRGB. Before saving images for the web in PE 2 colour saturation has the bee lowered with 10% in some colours in some images. Othervise the images may look oversaturated.
4. After download of the images from the camera to the computer you can import them into iPhoto with good colours!

Best Regards

Hans Spicar

[Richard_Lynch]

>>The camera does tag the files with sRGB but does not include the profile.

By this, do you mean that it is included in the EXIF data only?

Certainly it could be (and is likely) that the original space is larger than sRGB. If you are not getting the right result, have you tried shutting off Color Management? have you entertained other color management settings? Can you forward an example file?

My guess is that using RAW files and the RAW plugin will get you better results.

[Hans Spicar]

Olympus C8080 sets the exif data field to sRBG but does not embed a profile.

I have tried just about every setting there is… Photoshop Elements handles the images as sRGB even if colourmanagement is turned of.

iPhoto imports the images without doing anything with exif-data and does show the images with pale colours. It says the software version of the file is v757-75 which is the number of the camera software. If I use Image Capture and embed a colourspace the software version is QuickTime 6.5.1.

Photoshop Elements reads the exif-data and, if no colourspace is embedded, embeds the colour space that is specified in the exif-data. So in Photoshop Elements there is no problem but I use iPhoto to organise, publish and print most of my images so I have to create a easy workflow that gives good results regardless of the software I am using.

I have not tried using RAW files. The reason for this is that the camera gets looked 10 to 15 seconds during saving the files to the memory card. In most situations I just can’t wait that long.

I have uploaded four example files on my homepage. Nr 1 is how the file comes of the camera without any manipulation of exif-info or profiles. Nr 2 to nr 4 got a colourspace embedded importing them from the camera with Image Capture. Nr 2 got sRGB, nr 3 Nikon Bruce and nr 4 AO RGB Canon N. The last profile is custom made by my brother in law who is a professional photographer. The profile is made for compact Canon cameras to adjust the red tones. It is very close to Adobe RGB 1998. It also fits my Olympus very well!