Luminar and other Skylum products show colours incorrectly
Answered
Dear Skylum
You have great software and it is getting better and better, but you are failing in one of the most basic aspects of photo editing:
Luminar for Windows does not display colours correctly. None of the versions up to know have done this correctly. Even though images viewed and edited in Luminar may look great inside the program, as soon as they are exported to print or to email or to view in any other software, the colours are not the same as displayed in Luminar (therefore other software display images much closer to the accepted industry standard).
This is the most basic of functions a photo editing program should have!!! WHY ARE YOU KEEP ON IGNORING THIS??? It is completely unnecessary!!!
Because of this ERROR (yes, this really is an error...), anyone that takes their photos seriously needs to view and correct it further in another programs like Photoshop, Lightroom or Topaz, etc, before printing or sharing.
Again, why are you ignoring this issue???? I really love to completely stop using Photoshop and only focus on using Luminar and Aurora, but this most basic of errors in your software prevents me (and all other serious users of your software...) from doing so.
An honest reply will be most welcome please.
Kind regards.
Wynand du Plessis
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It's not just colors. I'm working on some old scanned images where the detail in the sky is completely lost. I used sky replacement to add some subtle sky detail. In the application it looks great. As soon as it's exported it looks completely different. Look at the sky in the first snip, which is from the application, and compare it to the 2nd exported snip. That's pretty disappointing.
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David are you comparing Apples with Apples? In other words, is the exported copy the same resolution as the original?
If I take a RAW image or high res TIFF and export it as a compressed JPG then unless my JPG is a not compressed very much I will see differences. That is why when I send files to my printing company to print 18"x12" prints I send them 5-10Mb files. Anything less than 2Mb and I start to see a difference in the finished product.
The first thing I would do to that sky is reduce sharpening and maybe reduce noise.
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Alfred, the original file is a high resolution jpg scan of an old picture so it's quite large. Luminar will import it just fine, but when trying to export it will not let you export at original resolution so it had to be reduced slightly (there are red boxes around dimensions and the export button is disabled). That is another problem, but not my primary concern. So yes, it's jpg to jpg...apples to apples.
The snips you see above are not the original files. I just used the windows snipping tool to grab a sample so illustrate the difference in what you see in the product vs what you get when you export. It's not related to sharpening or noise reduction...it's just a severe degradation of quality on export.
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Alfred, I appreciate the attempt at help, but you are obfuscating. It's not about file size and one of your images doesn't even have the sky replacement. This is really straightforward. What you see in app should be reasonably reflected in the export file. if you look at the samples I provided, they aren't even close.
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Of course one of the images doesn't have a sky replacement. That was the whole idea to show the original jpg and the one with the sky replacement. You are correct your images have problems. I have never had your issue so I have difficulty in understanding the cause of your problems. I am not into scanning old images so will probably never encounter your problem.
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It copes with it just fine. It has the exact effect I want. It's the export that is the problem, and that is the only way to actually use what you've edited. Which of course is the main theme on this thread going back to last year. What you see in the app is not what get on export. I've never had a discrepancy in what I've edited and what I've exported in Adobe products.
Skylum seems to have made improvements that fixed some of the original complaints, which is great. Hopefully they will use this example as a way to continue to improve. Happy to share original files with Skylum if needed.
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David Renfroe Did you try to disable your display ICC profiles (return to sRGB default) and export pictures in sRGB color space?
I had to reset my display color space to sRGB. In the past I used a calibrated ICC profile created with a Spyder 3 Pro. But colors in Luminar 4 were different after the export (saturation).What works is: Display: sRGB default profile, Luminar 4 export in sRGB color space.
It's sad that Luminar 4 still does not support calibrated displays on windows or makes real use of wider color spaces as it renders in sRGB internally. -
To make this a little easier to test, I reduced the original scan to 2880 x 2910.
Alfred Zommers I'm exporting at quality = 10. You should not be able to see such drastic reduction in quality due to compression at that level. To be sure, I exported to TIFF and PNG and got the same result.
Reino Shz I have verified my settings match between Display and Luminar (sRGB). To be sure this isn't a device specific issue, I tried all of the above on my laptop and desktop with same results.
I also just noticed the image changes within the application. If I zoom to 100%, or really any zoom value larger than "fit to screen", and then click with the hand icon to move the image, the replaced sky changes on mouse button down (it distorts like the exported version). When I'm done moving the image and mouse button up it's goes back to normal. I think something is going on with the AI sky replacement feature itself. I'm using "BlueSky 4".
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Why can't they just disable the feature to check for your color profile? It messes up my image. Right now I have the perfect color profile. But just because Luminar doesn't know what to do with it I have to delete the profile, which makes my colors inaccurate. I'm considering a refund at this point because this program should make editing easier, not harder.
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