Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[MediaMongrel]

Images shown in JRiver look fine, right?  I thought so too.  But without a ‘correct’ reference to compare it with, one might never realize JRiver is incorrectly displaying your images.  I’ve been using JRiver for near a decade, and didn’t realize it until last month.

I use JRiver for music, video, and as a digital photo album.  I recently had a bunch of old photo negatives digitally scanned to JPG.  Many were in need of dust/scratch clean-up and color correction, which I began doing in Photoshop.  However, what I’m about to discuss also applies to all the digital photos I (and likely you) have ever taken with a smart phone or digital camera. 

When I finished editing the photos in Photoshop, I’d save them, and then on the same monitor, I'd re-open them in JRiver and notice that the JRiver photos looked off… the skin tones were overly reddish compared to what I had saved in Photoshop.  Without a good reference point, I would never have noticed; but side by side, the difference was evident.

I did some digging online.  It’s not an entirely uncommon problem with image apps… for example, Windows applications ‘Paint’ and ‘IrfanView’ have the same issue, while ‘Photos’ does not.

Most any digital image you’re likely to be familiar with comes with an embedded color profile (aka color space).  2 very common ones are ‘sRGB’ and ‘Adobe RGB (1998)’… with Adobe RGB covering a broader spectrum of colors than sRGB. Every digital photo I’ve ever taken, and the negatives I had professionally scanned, all seem to have been encoded by default with the sRGB color profile. 

By ‘embedded’, I not only mean the image file is literally encoded with a specific color space, but with what’s also essentially a ‘tag’ that identifies the contained color profile.   Various image applications have the ability to read the tag and decide on how to display the image – whether to display it using the appropriate color space… or to take whatever color profile is in the image and then stretch or shrink it to fit the color space of an alternative (aka wrong) color profile.

That’s what JRiver does.  It takes every sRGB image, ignores its color profile tag, and automatically displays it as if it is an Adobe RGB image.  In the process, the sRGB colors are shifted into neighbouring areas… the result looks similar, but not as it should. It’s a one-size- (or one-color-profile) -fits-all implementation (Adobe RGB).

For all JRiver users who wish to see their photos as they were meant to be seen, we can each manually ‘convert' our image collections (mine is many 1000s large) from sRGB to Adobe RGB (using software like Photoshop), so that no color space shifting occurs when JRiver, by default, opens it in the Adobe RGB space. 

For those interested to learn more about the issue, I’ve included the following links to get you started:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtIJLIM0uy0&t=276s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=071XzduxEqI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdUZh7JuGU8

[JimH]

I did some digging online.  It’s not an entirely uncommon problem with image apps… for example, Windows applications ‘Paint’ and ‘IrfanView’ have the same issue, while ‘Photos’ does not.

Then perhaps there are two standards. 

As you said, you had never noticed a problem until you had your images scanned.

[Manfred]

I have also Nikon ViewNX-i (Nikon Camera) for viewing and working with Images. It's for me good enough. Nikon ViewNX-i allows to select different color profiles. sRGB is the standard but you can choose also the Adobe color profiles WideRGB or RGB or others.

Should MC support different color profiles?

[MediaMongrel]

Being familiar with JRiver, the company's goal to make the best media center app around, and the lengths their support/coding team consistently continue to go to improve their product... right or wrong, I had presumed that bringing this oversight to their attention would be seen as a relatively simple fix to implement, relative to all the time & energy being invested in the complex video/audio features.

[Hendrik]

Your interpretation of the issue is not quite correct. PCs, and Media Center, typically operate entirely in sRGB, as thats the standard for PC monitors (its not called Standard RGB for nothing).
Most images are also sRGB, unless you specifically took photos in any other color space - which is not all that common, but possible.

Media Center does not modify the colors of the image. It does not "convert" it to Adobe RGB, it just leaves it whatever it was in the file - assuming it'll match your screen (more on that below).

Therefor, if you have a sRGB photo, and a sRGB monitor, the image should display as intended. This is the most common case for everyone.

When you do need color management is in two cases:
- Your image is not actually sRGB (relatively rare)
- Your monitor is not sRGB

The second case is more common then one might think. Many monitors are sold with a wide gamut, be it Adobe RGB, or something else, sometimes without full knowledge of whoever owns them. Many monitors of this nature have a "sRGB Mode" you can enable to avoid this problem, presuming you never actually intended to have to deal with a wide gamut screen, as 99% of all applications are not color managed (including many very popular things, including most web browsers)

If an image looks more saturated then expected, its a sign of the second case, if it were to look less saturated, that would more likely favor the first option.

So yes, theoretically color management is needed if one of the two cases above happens, but it most definitely does not affect the wide variety of people that have standard monitors.
In the second case, there is also no information attached to the image that would have any meaning, instead you would need information about the screen you use.

TL;DR:
sRGB is the standard for PCs, and by using a monitor in a different color space you are basically diverging from this standard. Unfortunately, Windows really doesn't have the capability to deal with this for you, so they leave that up to every single software to deal with instead - which is of course silly.

If your monitor offers this, and you never had any intention of using a wider gamut in the first place, using a "sRGB Mode" is an easy fix, and would fix all the applications, not just Media Center.

[bogdanbz]

Embedded color profiles are very common though, and they're supported by the widely used jpg image file format. You can get an image file with an embedded color profile that describes how to interpret the image data either directly when shooting with certain photo cameras, or after editing the image in a photo or general image editing software. All of Adobe's offerings use and may be configured to embed image color profiles, as they're made to support color managed workflows for professionals.

I take it from the above reply that JRiver doesn't make use of the embedded color profiles to show the intended colors of image files. Only the video renderers such as madVR and JRVR apply color transforms, only for video content.

[MediaMongrel]

Hendrik, thank you for starting to get this conversation rolling.  You touched on a few points, including:

1.   Media Center does not modify the colors of the image. It does not "convert" it to Adobe RGB, it just leaves it whatever it was in the file - assuming it'll match your screen.  Therefor, if you have a sRGB photo, and a sRGB monitor, the image should display as intended. This is the most common case for everyone.

2.   Your monitor is not sRGB… in (this case), there is also no information attached to the image that would have any meaning, instead you would need information about the screen you use.

3.   If your monitor offers this, and you never had any intention of using a wider gamut in the first place, using a "sRGB Mode" is an easy fix, and would fix all the applications, not just Media Center.

My responses…

1.   I might guess that most consumer monitors are sRGB, agreed.  To clarify for readers here, Photoshop does not convert an sRGB image in any way (unless you instruct it to), in order to still display it correctly on my wide-color display… it simply reads the color-profile tag within the image, and displays it correctly.  This being Windows, I imagine Photoshop also knows about my display (Display – Settings), in order to match the image color-profile to my display’s capabilities.

I imagine JRiver/MadVR does something very similar, reading A) the video file, and then B) the display capabilities (JRiver – Video – MadVR Settings – Devices), and then matching them both. 

2.   For the record, my monitor is the Acer XV272U… 10bit color (via dithering), and covers 95% of DCI-P3 color space (130% sRGB), factory color calibrated at Delta E<2. 

There actually IS meaningful information attached to the image… at least, that’s what all my research keeps suggesting.  That’s the ‘color profile’ embedded in the image.  Photoshop can read it, and display in text which color profile this or that image is encoded with. 

However, it’s true that not all images have an embedded color profile… most likely to be some images that are downloaded from online.  I’ve opened some of these in Photoshop, and will get a warning that it has no embedded color profile instructions, and what I’d like to do about it.

3.   Yes, my monitor does have an sRGB Mode that I can manually switch to in the worst case scenario.  I’d rather JRiver become a ‘color managed’ app, and automatically handle such images (and videos) correctly.  Especially because, I don’t generally use JRiver at all, using my desktop and monitor… my desktop is mainly used for productivity apps like Photoshop, Word, Excel + Youtube. 

For media display/entertainment, I instead use JRiver on my media server, which is connected to an LG OLED tv – another wide color gamut display.  And unless I’m mistaken, I think a LOT of JRiver users would be considered ‘enthusiasts’ like me… not your average consumer.  As such, I imagine a lot of JRiver users might actually have wide color gamut displays – a much greater % than the general populace.  That’s why I think this may actually be quite a relevant upgrade to JRiver users, even if they’re not yet aware of it being an issue.

[flac.rules]

Your interpretation of the issue is not quite correct. PCs, and Media Center, typically operate entirely in sRGB, as thats the standard for PC monitors (its not called Standard RGB for nothing).
Most images are also sRGB, unless you specifically took photos in any other color space - which is not all that common, but possible.

Media Center does not modify the colors of the image. It does not "convert" it to Adobe RGB, it just leaves it whatever it was in the file - assuming it'll match your screen (more on that below).

...

I would say most(?) new monitors support wider than SRGB today though? Isn't this also communicated to the system by the monitor? I would argue that if a program wants to be used for photo-managment, as MC wants to be, it should handle this?

[spanky1406]

For most users it might not be relevant, since they only use the sRGB color space anyway.
However, there are users who are more concerned with the topic, have the appropriate equipment (from the camera to the print) and want to use the possibilities of the AdobeRGB color space.

I currently use Lightroom as my image management software because it offers color management. However, I would much rather use MC, as the tagging capabilities are far superior. Unfortunately, I can't since MC doesn't handle color profiles.