Ive noticed recently when Ive been editing some of my photos that the colours dont seem right, they seem much flatter compared to when Im viewing them with Windows RAW viewer.   Take this example both from the same NEF, the first was opened in photoshop with camera raw and had basically nothing done to it, a little bit of sharpening and a border put on.  The second was opened in Microsofts RAW Viewer and then saved from that into a jpg and then the same done to it in photoshop.





The colours look completely different, anyone got any clues as to what Im missing?

It does seem to be something like an ICC Profile but Ive tried what I can find in photoshop with no change and searching the net hasnt exactly brought up much yet, the search continues...

The question you need to ask yourself is whether Windows RAW viewer is increasing the saturation and is actually not the true representation of the original image.  I use Photoshop RAW editor (Bridge) and yes, it does look like my images are a lot less saturated.  What I would normally do is boost the saturation and get it looking right in PS.   Then I choose the convert to colour profile from the menu and choose sRGB before converting to jpg - this then gives the closest to PS image when viewing outside (ie in Internet Explorer).  I would trust PS over the Windows one anyday.  

I have been battling (as have a huge amount of Flickr users) with colour profiles and what you view in Flickr compared to your original export from PS.  Basically, if I was to just save my image straight out to jpg and upload to flickr, it looks like it has been sharpened and the colour is definately desaturated from the original.  I basically have to do the above (convert profile) for each image before importing into Flickr.  Apparently, flickr strips out the colour profile before displaying the image.

I agree, although I do feel that Flickr are responsible for this and not the browser.  Why?  Because, when I upload images to other photo sites and view them (ie. deviantart) they are not saturated/sharpened; and if IE is responsible for not reading the colour profile properly, should that not affect all?  Although for me the benefits of Flickr, still outweigh this small annoyance.

Tis slightly off topic, but I kinda prefer the clouds in the first (flat) image but the boats in the second image!

I gave up trying to figure out how to get my colour profiles after about 30 mins of trying a few years back. Too much uncertainty over whether I was just calibrating the profiles to look good in my monitor which for all I knew could be out of whack with the majority of other peoples monitors in terms of colours!

Quote from: zpyder

Tis slightly off topic, but I kinda prefer the clouds in the first (flat) image but the boats in the second image!

You can put the second over the first as a new layer and make the sky from the first visible.

Which is exactly what I did with another pair of photos I took at the same spot the day after those two above, ended up with the first photo in this thread

http://www.tekforum.co.uk/posts/list/13207.page

Which I thinks quite good, but Im biased   -)