Choose your colour space carefully for Ipernity

I have been wondering for a while now why my beautiful colour photographs end up looking desaturated and washed out every time I upload them to Ipernity (and Flickr for that matter). Below is an example of what I'm talking about:

ipernity colour

The image on the right is how my photo looks in lightroom, the one on the left is what happens when I send it to Ipernity; big difference. This obviously frustrated me because I just was not able to convey what I needed to in terms of colour and saturation and pictures with impact ended up pretty average.

Tonight I embarked on an experiment to try and find out why.

When I export from Lightroom, from RAW (NEF) to JPG I can choose one of 3 options: sRGB, AdobeRGB (1998) and ProPhoto RGB. Without being a guru of color spaces, sRGB is the standard proposed by Microsoft and HP in 1995 for print and web; proPhoto is a standard developed by Kodak for photographic output and is the largest of the colour spaces and AdobeRGB was developed in 1998 to encompass the colours achievable on CMYK printers. For the more technically minded here is an article detailing why proPhoto RGB is far superior to the others.

Anyway the trouble seems to lie in how the photo-sharing websites handle the different colour spaces. Flickr and Ipernity (and I would love clarification on this) seem to handle the sRGB colour space quite well but their interpretations of the other two leave a lot to be desired squarely with how the browsers handle the colour spaces (see Don's comment below) - Safari is the only browser to display these images correctly. The proof of the pudding is in the eating and here are 3 of the same photos exported using the different colour profiles.

1. Worst is Prophoto RGB (although this is the preferred colour space for photography)

Prophoto RGB

2. In second place comes AdobeRGB (better but not quite there)

Adobe RGB

3. The best overall representation comes from the older sRGB which is a pity really.

Pine and Mist (sRGB)

In closing, none of these gives a true representation of what I see on the screen for some unknown reason. The truest approximation can be seen in the screen shot at the start of this article and that was a screen grab ... maybe some colour deity can explain this to me.

Save sRGB when you export from Lightroom and other software to have the best possible representation of your photo on Ipernity and let's hope the photo websites non-Safari browsers all get their Prophoto RGB ducks in a row sometime soon.