Some of my images are being noted for being too bright although they look fine on my 3 monitors. Below are screen grabs from my LR screen and the Birdlife web page.  For some reason the BLP image looks brighter.  So I’m confused.  Should I darken the photos I send to BLP? I have sent a screenshot of the Export settings in LR. Unfortunately, the edge of the photo is cut off so it might not be of much use.  It's OK on screen.

Hi Leigh, it's possible the cause is your choice of colour space: ProPhoto RGB. All photos submitted to our site (and any other website) should usually be set to sRGB, which is a standard used by all websites and very widely in the printing industry as well as many other places. I can't be certain this is the cause but it's a strong possibility. Changing the colour space forces your computer to generate a different set of RGB values to those of the sRGB colour space. The reason is that particular hues have particular RGB values (expressed as three numbers ranging between zero and 255) mapped to them and, importantly these RGB values for one colour space will produce a different hue in a different colour space. This enables some colour spaces to specify a wider range of colours but at the cost of less subtle gradations across the board. This theoretically can also impact the brightness of an image. In your case, if the RGB values for a particular hue in ProPhoto RGB and lower than the values in sRGB, the image will look darker.

I'm sorry if this is a bit technical but the short response is to select (always) sRGB as the output colour space for any image you submit to us.

Leigh

The only attachment I can see is a shot of the export settings. Did you intend to also upload a screen shot of the photo?

To pick up Glenn's point, as I understand it, there are important differences between the working colour space and the output colour space.  Some software programs will default to unusual or even proprietary colour spaces for the purposes of editing raw files, with a view to maximising the sublety of colour adjustments and the gamut of colours available.  However, as Glenn says it is important particularly for web viewing to ensure the output is in sRGB.  Whether you need to select this in export settings will depend on software, I expect, and I also would have thought that the act of exporting into a JPEG forces a file to convert into a sRGB colour space (I'm assuming the default colour space for JPEG is sRGB) but I may be wrong.  You would not be able to upload a JPEG to BLP if it were not in sRGB, I think.

Regardless, the software should be exporting the file in a way which achieves a JPEG that is as close as possible to what is seen on your screen during raw editing, whatever working colour space you are using.  Some changes are possible in the exporting process (eg sharpening, noise reduction) but as long as you are not compressing the JPEG excessively, comparing the exported file with the edited picture in your raw processing software on the same screen should not show dramatic differences in brightness, I would have thought.  If this were the case, it would be impossible to produce good JPEG images, as some guesswork about the export process settings would always be involved.

Our website uses standard web software which I would expect displays JPEG images exactly as they are uploaded.  In other words, as far as I know it does not edit any aspects of the JPEG file, including the colour and brightness values. Viewing the JPEG file in a browser vs using windows photo viewer should not show significant differences.  As I am sitting here at the computer, I have a recent image of mine open on the BLP web page in two different browsers, as well as the original JPEG I uploaded to BLP open in the windows photo viewer, and all are identical in brightness and colour viewed at 100% size on the same screen.  So I'm not sure what is happening to make you perceive an image as brighter on the web than in other software on your computer.  Our web site does not add brightness, nor should your browser be adding brightness.

I think it's important that you are comparing apples with apples.  You should probably not be comparing a JPEG open in a software program which does not use sRGB as its working space, with a JPEG viewed in a web browser.  It is quite possible that your software program might be doing some strange things to the JPEG to bring it back into its own colour space, resulting in a slightly different appearance in your monitor.

One common source for too bright output images is that the monitor brightness is not set correctly for the workspace.  As a result, the photographer may increase the overall brightness of an image in the software to compensate, resulting in an image that looks overly bright on another monitor which has been properly calibrated.  To achieve accurate brightness and colour, ideally at least the monitor you use as your primary editing tool should be calibrated using a suitable tool, although I appreciate this may not be possible. These tools can also help you set brightness levels of your monitor appropriate for your working environment,  such that you are getting a consistent approach (in my experience the setting will often look too bright in a dimly lit room, leading to a desire to turn down brightness to sub-optimal levels).  It is also important to pay attention to the histogram during editing, which will give some indication of the brightness of the image independent of the monitor although it's not foolproof.  You could also use the eyedropper tool to measure the colour values of white areas of the image; which should be close to clipping but not actually clipped. One other trick I sometimes use is to view images on a device which has screen brightness which responds to ambient light levels (in my case, and iPad Air).  iPads in particular have quite good colour and brightness management at default settings, so if a picture looks OK on them in normal room lighting, it should look OK on most other screens.

Thanks
Simon

A few clarifications on this... Simon wondered if a file will even upload to BLP if it's not using sRGB colour space. It will as no check is done on this as I understand it. I helped another member some years ago who was having a similar problem - that person was saving their JPG in a different colour space and uploading it (successfully) and wondered why it looked different on our site compared to their own screen. When that person changed the colour space of their JPG to sRGB before uploading, the difference went away.

When a JPG is created, there is no change made to the image colours as part of the process. JPG simply compresses the image data to reduce the file size (often dramatically). The 'cost' of this is some loss of fine detail and possible introduction of artefacts like banding in evenly coloured areas but JPG conversion itself has no impact on colour. As indicated in my earlier post, colour is controlled by the colour space used and if a file created in one colour space is viewed as though it was in a different colour space, it's going to look different. This should be the sole source of any colour variation and, I believe, the source of the issue here.

There is no doubt colour management is a very complex and 'mind-bending' area so I hope this has helped rather than confused further.