Getting good color in Photos
I've never really liked iPhoto. Blasphemous, I know. I'm sure it works quite well for family vacation photos and other "happy snaps" but it seems a little clunky and somewhat limited for serious photographers. That's undoubtedly why Apple produced Aperture. I don't use Aperture because my humble laptop doesn't meet the minimum hardware requirements. It sings with iView, however.
Getting back to iPhoto... since I don't use it (or at least didn't until I started preparing for iPhone) I had forgotten that I turned off the "Copy files to iPhoto Library folder when adding to library" preference. In my iPhone preparations I was a dragging-and-dropping fiend, pulling in photos from some of my external drives as well as my local drive. Last night was the first time I synced without those drives mounted. When I saw iTunes' status bar say "Deleting photos..." I started to worry. Why was it deleting photos from iPhone?
During my troubleshooting, I discovered that the files iTunes had deleted were all TIFFs. I naturally assumed that was the problem and used Photoshop to create JPEG versions -- I also took that opportunity to size the photos to fit iPhone's screen dimensions and apply size-appropriate sharpening. I synced iPhone and what do you know? The photos were back. Only they looked washed-out compared to how they looked on the iPhone before. The colors were less saturated and contrast was lower, as if they didn't get converted from Adobe RGB to sRGB. Of course I realize that sRGB has a smaller gamut than Adobe RGB, but the images looked the same on my laptop screen after the color space conversion. After saving as JPEG and then opening the JPEGs in Photoshop again, they still looked almost identical to their Adobe RGB brethren with only very slightly less saturation. In iPhoto and on iPhone, however, they showed a marked difference. I tried saving the JPEGs with and without embedded profiles, but it didn't matter.
So the moral of the story is that if you have richly saturated photos that you want to display on your iPhone in all their glory, save them as single-layer TIFFs.
Getting back to iPhoto... since I don't use it (or at least didn't until I started preparing for iPhone) I had forgotten that I turned off the "Copy files to iPhoto Library folder when adding to library" preference. In my iPhone preparations I was a dragging-and-dropping fiend, pulling in photos from some of my external drives as well as my local drive. Last night was the first time I synced without those drives mounted. When I saw iTunes' status bar say "Deleting photos..." I started to worry. Why was it deleting photos from iPhone?
During my troubleshooting, I discovered that the files iTunes had deleted were all TIFFs. I naturally assumed that was the problem and used Photoshop to create JPEG versions -- I also took that opportunity to size the photos to fit iPhone's screen dimensions and apply size-appropriate sharpening. I synced iPhone and what do you know? The photos were back. Only they looked washed-out compared to how they looked on the iPhone before. The colors were less saturated and contrast was lower, as if they didn't get converted from Adobe RGB to sRGB. Of course I realize that sRGB has a smaller gamut than Adobe RGB, but the images looked the same on my laptop screen after the color space conversion. After saving as JPEG and then opening the JPEGs in Photoshop again, they still looked almost identical to their Adobe RGB brethren with only very slightly less saturation. In iPhoto and on iPhone, however, they showed a marked difference. I tried saving the JPEGs with and without embedded profiles, but it didn't matter.
So the moral of the story is that if you have richly saturated photos that you want to display on your iPhone in all their glory, save them as single-layer TIFFs.
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