A-M-P wrote:
That dress is not red looks pinkish tone on my end. I think you need to calibrate your monitor.

It looks vivid red on mine (viewed on Chrome). I think it's the ICC profile at fault

A-M-P wrote:
That dress is not red looks pinkish tone on my end. I think you need to calibrate your monitor.

imcFOTO wrote:
It looks vivid red on mine (viewed on Chrome). I think it's the ICC profile at fault

Yeah, it looks red to me too... has a color bias (from artist color theory) towards a purple hue, but red in principle... I actually like how it looks on my screen.

AJScalzitti wrote:
Red is the color with the lowest energy and the hardest for digital cameras to capture, but it looks red on mine (agree wit Udor, tending to purple)

I just looked at the picture again... and I noticed that there is a lot of blue on the steel ladder and also on the walls... so I am guessing the OP pushed the blue value, which cools down the red and pushes it towards a purple tone.

Ruben Vasquez wrote:
I agree with others, the dress is red but there is a bit of bias towards blue. This is because there's too much blue in the dress causing it to shift towards pink/purple. To fix this, I would recommend a channel mixer adjustment layer, select the blue channel and lower it to 0% and then raise the green channel to 100%. Most of the effect will be in the dress but the rest of the image will shift a bit as well. To isolate the effect almost exclusively to the dress, change the layer blend mode to darken. I also lowered the layer opacity to 60% and got this:

Top image is what I consider a true red but then again I'm a girl and to me the bottom would be considered more of a dark pink tone.

They say women have more names for colors and can see a bigger spectrum of shades. My BF used to fight with me saying something was yellow and I would say it was neon  green. Too him it was either green or yellow no in between lol so we both took a color test and I score much better than him I could see more shades of colors than he could.

To me the reason it looks muddy is because you added  blue to the shadows shifting it's color tone slightly towards a pink/purple undertone thus not making it a true red. From an artist point of view when you mix red and blue you get magenta which is what I think happened to your image. If you get rid of the blue the dress will look like a true red.

A-M-P wrote:

Top image is red to me but then again I'm a girl and to me the bottom would be considered more of a dark pink than red.

i agree top image is actual red, bottom image would still be considered "red" but has a much pinkier tone.

do you save srgb for online

imcFOTO wrote:
I had lots of problems myself even though I was using sRGB throughout my process. Images seemed to appear differently depending on the browser I was using.

I solved my problem once I found out that the sRGB icc profile being used on my PC was the version 4 and not the more widely supported version 2. I was able to change this as the default and images now seem much more consistent. Problem is, I can't remember how I changed it!

Here's an interesting link that will help you see the difference.

http://www.color.org/version4html.xalter

On my PC it renders everything consistently in Internet Explorer but neither Chrome or Firefox will render the v4 properly. Seems most browsers are slow to adopt compatibility with v4 sRGB ICC profile. On Chrome, the blue sky in the top left quadrant is much more muted.

I don't know if this is your problem - but something worth investigating perhaps.

That's a really good point about the colour profiles.

I'm also using the most recent version of chrome, and the dress looks magenta to me in-browser.  I downloaded the file, and in Windows Picture Viewer and Photoshop it looked more 'red' - more so in PS.

If you're using Preview, I'm assuming that means that you have a Mac.  Although Photoshop and other colour-managed programs theoretically work the same on Windows and Mac, preview and picture viewer do not, as they use the OS' native colour space.

D Alberto Photography wrote:
Thanks!

Darwin

Darwin, since everyone else are handling the difficult answers...

Are you positive that the color space profile is always being saved in your file output?  For example, sometimes using  'save for web' option may omit the srgb profile if you don't make sure it is checked to be included.

It is my understanding that if that is not in there, you can get random results, and obviously, if you're going from computer to computer comparing, EACH and every computer needs to be calibrated, you can't consider the appearance on an uncalibrated computer as indicative of anything for evaluating color quality.

clickman818 wrote:
Ok Then .. you all have given this monkey somthing to play with. I take the color venn stick it to photoshop and fire up the channel mixer and play. Needin to get the intuitive feel for the effects depending on sliders and output channels ...

Thanks

It's a good idea to have the channels palette open when you're manipulating the channel mixer so you can actually see what's going on. Get to know your color theory well. I find that it helps to think of it like mixing paint. Don't forget that you can use various layer blend modes as well. The ones I use the most are Normal, Lighten, Screen, Darken, Multiply, Color, and Luminosity. Much of the time, the affect is too much so it helps to adjust the opacity to really dial in the amount of change you want.

A-M-P wrote:

Top image is what I consider a true red but then again I'm a girl and to me the bottom would be considered more of a dark pink tone.

They say women have more names for colors and can see a bigger spectrum of shades. My BF used to fight with me saying something was yellow and I would say it was neon  green. Too him it was either green or yellow no in between lol so we both took a color test and I score much better than him I could see more shades of colors than he could.

To me the reason it looks muddy is because you added  blue to the shadows shifting it's color tone slightly towards a pink/purple undertone thus not making it a true red. From an artist point of view when you mix red and blue you get magenta which is what I think happened to your image. If you get rid of the blue the dress will look like a true red.

There are far more men with varying degrees of color blindness than women. I used to print images for a job, when color was critical I always consulted with female coworkers to make sure it was correct. I have measurable color blindness but not total. I have actually improved through practice.

There are apparently quite a few women who have exceptional perception of color:

http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/26 … ne-of-them

D Alberto Photography wrote:
DougBPhoto: Yep. For output, sRGB is always checked. But if it weren't, I'm not sure I wouldn't be too embarrassed to admit it. Haha

Ruben, imcFoto, clickman, and others regarding channels, profiles: Thanks, again. I vaguely recall messing around with channels a couple years ago but got away from it. I guess I better get back to it fast. Same with the color profiles.

Good stuff. Thanks!

- Darwin

Good, sometimes the easiest explanations are often overlooked.

Personality Imaging wrote:
It's not going to do much good to calibrate your monitor because nobody else calibrates theirs. 
The best you can do is refuse to post serious work on crap sites like Facebook.

I seriously hope no one takes this incredibly bad advice.

Personality Imaging wrote:
It's not going to do much good to calibrate your monitor because nobody else calibrates theirs. 
The best you can do is refuse to post serious work on crap sites like Facebook.

Ruben Vasquez wrote:
I seriously hope no one takes this incredibly bad advice.

It's excellent advice - just maybe not the way you're reading it.

Think of it this way:  we all know that Facebook and other social media sites reduce the quality of your images in some way, and they look worse.  So why on Earth would you want to post serious work somewhere when you know it will look worse than if you had posted it elsewhere?

The only good reason is if you don't have the time or money to make a proper website.  Otherwise, you're accepting lower quality for no reason.

B L ZeeBubb wrote:
There are far more men with varying degrees of color blindness than women. I used to print images for a job, when color was critical I always consulted with female coworkers to make sure it was correct. I have measurable color blindness but not total. I have actually improved through practice.

If you improved, then you might not actually be colour blind

Colour blindness is an odd duck, and there are really more types than what we normally talk about.  Normally we only talk about recognizing and naming individual swatches - saying that's green, that's red, etc.  Those swatches might be lighter or darker, but the swatches they use in those tests are almost always one colour, in various shades.  But it also comes in to play when trying to 'rank' colours(many tests make you sort colours in a tonal range from say red to purple), and when trying to colour correct.

I used to think I was colour blind as well; I even had a painting professor say that she thought the same thing of me.  I didn't take it personally, because I also had her for drawing, and I aced that class.  But I'm starting to think that it's just a lack of experience.

I used to be very poor at all three forms of colour recognition that I mentioned.  Now, I can colour correct fairly well.  I keep a Lee filter kit handy, and that helps an awful lot, and my eyes have been much better trained.  I still struggle with recognizing colours outright though, even though I can very clearly recognize when there is more or less of a colour.  If I went back to painting, and I was doing something like a Lucian Freud-type painting where my colours were mixed on the canvas, I'd be continually grabbing the wrong tubes of paint.  It sounds odd that I can pick up on subtle changes but miss the bigger ones of 'are those shadows blue or cyan?', but one is a matter of comparison, and one is recognizing those colours in a vacuum.

If I were actually colour blind, I wouldn't be able to do either of them correctly, nor would I be able to learn - if your eyes don't pick up certain colours, you can't train them.  I might be slightly colour blind, but it's much more likely that I lacked experience in seeing and paying attention to colour.

It's more likely that is your explanation as well.

Personality Imaging wrote:
It's not going to do much good to calibrate your monitor because nobody else calibrates theirs. 
The best you can do is refuse to post serious work on crap sites like Facebook.

Ruben Vasquez wrote:
I seriously hope no one takes this incredibly bad advice.

Zack Zoll wrote:
It's excellent advice - just maybe not the way you're reading it.

I guess I should have been a little more explicit in what I was protesting. It wasn't that bit about Facebook but the little bit regarding monitor calibration, I contend as pretty bad advice that people shouldn't pay any attention to.

I went ahead and highlighted the pertinent portion in bold.

udor wrote:

I just looked at the picture again... and I noticed that there is a lot of blue on the steel ladder and also on the walls... so I am guessing the OP pushed the blue value, which cools down the red and pushes it towards a purple tone.

That will do it.  It's fine to do just mask more

Zack Zoll wrote:
That's why I said it was the way you were reading it.  You put the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble

Actually no, I didn't put the emphasis on anything; I left it open to interpretation as I thought it was obvious which part was the bad advice. I [wrongly] figured people (especially those with experience), would know this and wouldn't need any more explanation than that but there is always that one...

Ruben Vasquez wrote:
Actually no, I didn't put the emphasis on anything; I left it open to interpretation as I thought it was obvious which part was the bad advice. I [wrongly] figured people (especially those with experience), would know this and wouldn't need any more explanation than that but there is always that one...

I'm just yanking your chain.  Happy Easter

And to everyone else, while we're at it.

Zack Zoll wrote:
I'm just yanking your chain.  Happy Easter

And to everyone else, while we're at it.

Sorry. I didn't mean to get so defensive. I tend to get into debates a lot and have gotten tired of people misquoting me or twisting my words into something I never meant or even implied.

Happy Easter to you too dude.