What to do if your images look awful when uploaded to SGL

[Stub Mandrel]

Unlike ordinary photos, astrophotography images use a lot of blacks and faint colours and that means they can look really bad if the 'colour management' is off. This has plagued me for ages, look at the difference between this image as displayed on SGL compared with Windows preview:

The image looked even darker (and better) in Photoshop - honest!

Sometimes what looks great on my monitor here looks absolutely awful on SGL, and it's totally disheartening when my 'masterpiece' gets ruined when I share it.

I tried calibrating my monitor, which made no real difference, except I did find that it made processing images easier, but they still looked different online.

I knew the problem was with 'colour space' but I've finally sussed it and the same image now appears to look right in all my main imaging programs, SGL and Windows preview/file manager.

The answer was in two parts, the clue was that a program, Astra Image, that doesn't have colour management settings gave the same view as Firefox. I went through the options of every imaging program (and Windows) telling them to use the IEC sRGB colour space for images and my monitor's custom colour space (as previously set up using Windows display manager). This is relatively easy in most programs, although somehow they sometimes use slightly different descriptions.

Photoshop is trickier, as it overwhelms you with zillions of options (there are online explanations). The second part is, in photoshop, don't just tell it to use the IEC sRGB colour profile, but click the option to embed that profile in every image. This is a belt and braces option that will force things like web browsers to use the same settings to display your image as you used when you made it.

This seems to have solved my problem. Fortunately, most of my 'normal' photography I don't process in Photoshop, otherwise I might now need to reduce the 'gamma' on thousands of images.

Good luck, this is a very difficult thing to get your head around, and I did it by ignoring the technical details and just following eth principal of making everything match.