My girlfriend shot some photos with her Nikon D60 set to RAW. When I imported them into Photoshop, the colors were bright and dynamic. I didn't adjust them at all. However, when I exported them to JPEG the colors were all washed out and have a greenish hue.

I don't want the prints to look this way, and most automated print places only accept gif or jpeg. Is there something special I have to do to preserve the proper colors?

Equip: Nikon D60 / MacBook Pro OS 10.5 / PhotoShop CS3 (fully licensed not a pirate copy).

 

Weird.. I have the D60 too but always shoot in Jpeg-Fine +Raw and for quick prints I would just print from the jpeg. I'm interested to the experts chime in on this one

 

You should try a different RAW converter. This happens when I use lightroom...initially, the raw file "looks" how it does because of the settings in the camera, and then when exporting, it just exports the raw data, without any post processing. For nikon, I think Nikon Capture NX does the best job of retaining the in camera settings.

 

When I get home tonight I'll try to post a comparison... Maybe if I take a screen shot of the RAW photo on my screen I can preserve the color depth I was talking about. It really is a dramatic difference and there's no way that they can be printed that way. The lighting no longer has any depth and it looks very, very flat.

Edit:
Do you know what settings I could adjust in Photoshop's RAW converter that would help preserve the correct colors?

 

Not sure about CS3, but now Lightroom has Camera Profiles which should improve the looks of images. I haven't used them yet, so this all based on things I've read.

Also - what color space are you shooting in/exporting to? Generally, you want to stay with sRGB.

 

RAW is RAW, camera settings don't come into play. When you import into LR or Camera Raw those programs and some default setting to your images. When you export to jpeg, you're compressing the the image. If you done nothing to the image but use default, the image will be less than default because of the compressing.

Take sharpening ie: the default is 25, if you print using 25 it's not going to look good, you have to bump up the sharpening. In most programs adjusting the sharpening is an option during the print setup.

 

I tried using "No Color Profile" - but I think also used Adobe RGB 1998? I'll try sRGB. I'm not used to all these profiles - all my work experience is in general CMYK printing.

Would I get better results using an uncompressed TIFF?

 

It's almost guaranteed to be a colour profile issue. Use sRGB. It's possible to get better results with other profiles, but you need a pretty in-depth knowledge of how they work to use them. sRGB is pretty much fool-proof as most applications know how to handle that profile without any special changes.

 

sRGB looks better by far, but the difference is still very noticeable.

Edit: Actually - If I choose sRGB in the RAW Converter dialog box (rather than the Save As) box, the colors are MUCH more accurate. Thank you for the help!!

 

I got one right. I feel somewhat validated - especially since Dan agreed with me. Mom will be proud.