Acdsee pro color management

I've just been doing some more playing around trying to get ACDSee to work properly for me (fyi I am running vista 64 with a custom monitor profile created with ColorMunki) Camera is D300 usually

I feel I just need to share the frustrations. I have also found ACDSEE pro 2.5 completely confounding regarding color management and I think it is just broken.

Case 1:

• I enable color management with my default input to sRGB and the tick box to use embedded profiles when found.
• monitor profile is set to the one I created with color munki calibration system
• Output set to basic (ie not the print proofing set up)

Result: all images are way way off -- and generally look super contrasty and blown out

Case 2: (after trying a few random things)

• Same as above but I set the input default profile to be the same as the monitor profile (no reason, just trying things)

Result: images look ok, but actually look no different with color managment on or off -- even AdobeRGB ones

Strangeness issue 3:

ACDSee shows the color space for any images I shot in sRGB as sRGB, if I shot them in adobeRGB then it just says "uncalibrated". That is in the exif tab. If you look at the summary FILE tab, then it has an entry for embedded color profile, which is always for me N/A. I don't get what the difference is between the color space and profile.

• This always says N/A regardless of what color space the image was shot it and regardless of any use of the "batch convert icc profile" tool that in theory lets you select any of the registered profiles and save the image in that space/profile

fyi: I'm running Vista 64

Venting issue:

• I pursued some solutions with the support at ACDSee, but they made zero useful suggestions at the start (e.g. Did you turn color management on? -- which is funny since in my email I say "When I turn color management on...") and I gave up when they responded with suggestions about the windows OS color settings that don't actually exist in vista -- they are trying to assist by guessing, not testing, and clearly the little cheat sheet help manual they work from is for XP and does not have vista properly covererd.

uhg!

I am going to try lightroom and see if there is a way to migrate my tags over if it works well for me.

DR

An image can have an embedded color profile (the icc proflile is stored within the file) or a color space can be referenced. The latter is basically a hint for the viewer to use this profile, which it might do if the ICC profile is installed on the machine.

ACDSee shows the embedded profile in the File properties tab. If you see N/A then no profile is embedded in this image.

The Exif Image::Colorspace tag is part of the EXIF standard and this is what the standard says about this tag.

"Normally sRGB (=1) is used to define the color space based on the PC monitor conditions and environment. If a color space other than sRGB is used, Uncalibrated (=FFFF.H) is set. "

ACDSee shows this tag in the Exif properties tag. Uncalibrated means everything but sRGB.

You wrote that ACDSee shows N/A for "Embedded Color Profile", which means that there is none. Besides ACDSee you could use "Jeffrey's Exif viewer", an online tool that is based on ExifViewer, to examine your images. It should explicitely tell you whether your image has an embedded profile. http://regex.info/exif.cgi

If I had this problem I'd probably look into this first. Also using test images other than your own might help you to isolate your issue. The following link is referencing to some: http://www.normankoren.com/printer_calibration.html . If it still doesn't work correctly with those images then you'll have to investigate further (which ICC profiles are installed on your machine, correctness of the monitor profile, etc).

I hope that'll help.

frteskesc said:

An image can have an embedded color profile (the icc proflile is stored within the file) or a color space can be referenced. The latter is basically a hint for the viewer to use this profile, which it might do if the ICC profile is installed on the machine.

ACDSee shows the embedded profile in the File properties tab. If you see N/A then no profile is embedded in this image.

The Exif Image::Colorspace tag is part of the EXIF standard and this is what the standard says about this tag.

"Normally sRGB (=1) is used to define the color space based on the PC monitor conditions and environment. If a color space other than sRGB is used, Uncalibrated (=FFFF.H) is set. "

Click to expand...

Q: Is there then no way that an image can indicate that it is mapped into the ADOBE RGB color space? If I shoot in Adobe, do I need to just use my own workflow to identify those images? I guess I'm a little confused now as to how color management is supposd to work if an image out of my camera can't indicate what space it is taken in.

I think I'm missing something here.

frteskesc said:

ACDSee shows this tag in the Exif properties tag. Uncalibrated means everything but sRGB.

You wrote that ACDSee shows N/A for "Embedded Color Profile", which means that there is none. Besides ACDSee you could use "Jeffrey's Exif viewer", an online tool that is based on ExifViewer, to examine your images. It should explicitely tell you whether your image has an embedded profile. http://regex.info/exif.cgi

If I had this problem I'd probably look into this first. Also using test images other than your own might help you to isolate your issue. The following link is referencing to some: http://www.normankoren.com/printer_calibration.html . If it still doesn't work correctly with those images then you'll have to investigate further (which ICC profiles are installed on your machine, correctness of the monitor profile, etc).

I hope that'll help.

Click to expand...

I cannot check the link you provided as it seems broken (404) but using printer profiles to test for display issues is probably not a good idea, use display profiles instead: http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

Besides that, color management is hard and very few programs got it right.

--
Axel
http://www.fastpictureviewer.com

Dave Roberts said:

Q: Is there then no way that an image can indicate that it is mapped into the ADOBE RGB color space?

Click to expand...

If course there are ways! Programs implementing proper color management can recognize a D300 file shot in Adobe RGB mode and use said profile (even if it's not embedded in the image file) to properly process the pixels, while also displaying the proper profile name in the image info. Some rare programs even go a step further and actually understand custom-profiled monitors, if you have one, in addition to profiles and color-space information embedded in the files. One example of such programs is FastPictureViewer Professional, which exists in native 64-bit flavor, but be warned that I'm a bit biased as I authored it

http://www.fastpictureviewer.com

--
Axel
http://www.fastpictureviewer.com

Dave Roberts said:

Q: Is there then no way that an image can indicate that it is mapped into the ADOBE RGB color space? If I shoot in Adobe, do I need to just use my own workflow to identify those images? I guess I'm a little confused now as to how color management is supposd to work if an image out of my camera can't indicate what space it is taken in.

I think I'm missing something here.

Click to expand...

I think there is a way and the indication is actually happening using a different tag in the EXIF data.

I just run a test with Canon files which I quickly took using AdobeRGB colorspace. It seems that ACDSee is not recongnizing the color space correctly. It is using the default color profile set in the preferences. Photoshop is recognizing the color space correctly though. So, this might be a limitation of ACDSee, you might want to check in the ACDSee Forum or post a support request. If all of your images use AdobeRGB then you might consider setting the default color profile to AdobeRGB for now.

If setting the default color profile to AdobeRGB also doesn't give you the expected results then please go and get one of the test images I mentioned in my first post. Use one that has the color profile embedded. If this isn't shown correct either then something is wrong with your monitor profile or you might have set something incorrect in the ACDSee preferences.

Thanks for your input people.

I think this is again coming around to the simple fact that ACDSee Pro, regardless of the feature list and promises, does not do colour management properly.

I'm afraid to ask if anyone has hands on experience with the new 3.0 version.

DR

I am using ACDSee Pro3, and colour management seems to work fine under Windows XP Pro. Images with an embedded profile display correctly. I tried converting an image to ProRGB with Photoshop and viewing it in ACDSee with colour management on and off. Everything worked as expected.

One surprise was that the Windows Picture and Fax viewer honoured the embedded profile and displayed the ProRGB image correctly!!.

The only minor annoyance with ACDSee is that you cannot convert to a different colour space from within the editor - you have to use a batch convert function.

The embedded profile name displays in the ACDSee File Properties tab.

There were a number of options to set to get it started but they seemed straightforward enough.

Bumping this thread as some of us are still using relatively older versions of ACDSEE. I simply unchecked a setting under "viewer" called "use AcdSee Quickview" and it seems to suddenly be more accurate to my color profile.