Photo in PS is fine, upload it anywhere else and it's contrasted/darker?

[Hillin90]

When I work on a photo in PS it's fine, colours are okay - I upload them to imgur, picpar, tinypic, etc, it becomes contrasted and darker.

Here's the 'before'.

And here's the 'after'. It's a subtle difference but it adds green or blue to the colours and then makes it more contrasted. On other photos the difference isn't easily ignored and I'd really like there to be consistency.

If anyone can help me out with this I would greatly appreciate it, thank you.

[Nancy OShea]

I don't see a whole lot of difference between the 2 images.  Maybe because I'm on Win10 and using Firefox.

Which OS and browser are you using?  Believe it or not that can make a big difference.  Web images typically look darker on Mac browsers.

Nancy

[Hillin90]

I'm using Win10 on chrome. I did try using ExplorerEdge to see if the images were different, but they weren't. The difference isn't huge but when I'm editing other photos - it actually looks noticeable. I'd never had this issue before, which is why it bothers me.

[Nancy OShea]

Keep in mind that when you upload stuff to social sharing sites, they are apt to step on quality if for no other reason than to conserve resources on their servers (bandwidth, speed, etc...).  Since you cannot control this, you have to just live with it. 

What method are you using to save the JPG file?  File > Export As or Legacy Save for Web?

[Hillin90]

Normally I just save as PNG and I use 'Save As'.

[Nancy OShea]

Hillin90 wrote:

Normally I just save as PNG and I use 'Save As'.

That's a recipe for REALLY BIG FILES well over 100KB.

Use File > Export As and reduce quality slider to get the file size down for web.   I use JPEG for most web images because it's smaller than PNG.  I only use PNG when I need transparency like for icons.

Or you could use Legacy Save for Web which provides a 4-up screen for comparison of quality and file size. You want the smallest file size with the least destructive quality for the web.

[Hillin90]

It still darkens when I upload. I used all the same settings you put and it didn't change the outcome, I'm not really sure what's going on.

[D Fosse]

There is a difference, yes, the second version has significant clipping/compression in the shadows. This is consistent with viewing with and without color management.

Most standard displays have a native dip in the shadows, and this is compensated by the monitor profile - in applications that are color managed and use the profile.

You need to embed the color profile and use a color managed browser for consistency. If you use Save For Web or Export As, the embed checkbox is off by default and you need to check it.

Most browsers, even color managed ones, won't color manage files without an embedded profile. They don't convert into the monitor profile because there's no profile to convert from. Firefox can be set up to do this, but not Chrome.

[D Fosse]

That's a splendid shot BTW! I'm not sure I agree about the heavy blue tones and high contrast, but that's your call...

[Hillin90]

I did as told and I still see the difference. I'm not sure what's up but thank you for your answer! It helped, if even a little.

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

Well, it's actually quite simple.

If the file has an embedded icc profile, and it is viewed in a color managed application that will convert from that and into your monitor profile - then it will always display correctly. All color managed applications should always display identically.

If they don't, one of the three links in that chain is failing (source profile-conversion-destination profile). Usually it's the last of these, the display profile.