Exporting sRGB jpeg with ICC profile attached

That looks like an edge case to me, deliberately seeking a point of failure. I shoot in sRGB and output in sRGB and have my monitors calibrated to sRGB. Hard experience with Aperture and Lightroom over the years has shown me that mixing colour spaces creates trouble just when you aren’t expecting it.

If you wish to use other spaces, I’d suggest you set up shooting AdobeRGB, processing in AdobeRGB, monitors set to AdobeRGB and even output to AdobeRGB (most of the time, web of course has to be output to sRGB). Some labs only accept sRGB but I imagine if you are on an all AdobeRGB or ProPhoto with properly calibrated monitors that show close to 100% of those colour spaces, you would be using print houses which prefer AdobeRGB files.

Here is an interesting article from a professional photographer who also developed chip hardware for colour space conversion (so he knows how stuff). In a nutshell - he recommends you always use sRGB.

sRGB vs. Adobe RGB.

1 Like

@uncoy ,

I do not agree with your opinion.
I would like to be able to choose the working color space. My preferred option is to work in the color space of the input file.
Many software allow this. Photolab does not allow it.

There is little good reason for DxO to give users control of the Photolab’s internal colour spaces. It’s a great opportunity to tie up their core team bug-hunting colour issues for two to three years. About 1% of Photolab users might benefit from that change. I say might as switching between colour spaces generally causes more trouble than it creates benefit.

Looks like you will have to learn about the pain of mixing colour spaces the hard way. I hope someday somewhere someone will see a positive visual difference out of the complexity of your colour workflow.


Steve’s request to have Photolab optionally include an explicit sRGB profile in exports makes sense and is not much extra work for DxO at all.

I support Koko’s request that DxO PL improve its Export to Disk color management options interface. The current options are a hodge-podge. At the very least, make it clear when a profile will be embedded and when it will not be embedded (simply flagged). And while it may be old school, best practices color management advice has always been to embed the profile. One can, as has been mentioned, embed Nikon or other sRGB profiles, such as Elle Stone’s non-proprietary “well-behaved” profiles (V2 and V4) available on GitHub. However, the current work-around is not obvious to those new to DxO PL, hence this topic resurfacing every few months.

1 Like

That’s not what Koko is asking for at all. Koko is asking for DxO to change how PhotoLab handles colours internally which is a huge ask.

The original poster Steve is the one who asked for profiles to be embedded. I believe we all support allowing sRGB profiles to be embedded, even if it’s a checkbox which is turned off by default.

This is just the latest of several threads regarding embedding ICC profiles going back several years now. Koko has been consistent in asking that this particular issue be resolved. I do agree that discussions about the internal working color space should be (and are) in separate threads. Those discussions are not what I was addressing.

I think that is indeed where I have ended up. So I have raised it in the “Which feature do you need?” section. I do realise it repeats previous requests, but hey-ho…

Don’t want to ‘spoil’ your new thread. :slight_smile:

Please read from the provided links → Exporting sRGB jpeg with ICC profile attached - #7 by Wolfgang

  • Those profiles should be the same.
  • Try a custom export with the Nikon sRGB…icc profil. – If you are afraid for …I don’t know, try with a copy.
  • I don’t have other sRGB profiles than the one I showed you and tested with, which is reported by ExifTool !
  • Check, what’s used/expected in ‘your’ photo competition entry system to be compatible with
    and ask for the accepted profile – can’t be so difficult.
1 Like

Let me try to tell the story in a little more detail…

1. About the embedding of color profiles.
For the last more than 2 years I have been actively appealing for the solution of the problem with the missing color profile when exporting to sRGB. I am grateful to the colleagues from the forum, who together with me searched and in the end we found a temporary solution. The developers at some point promised us to investigate the problem and if it is confirmed to be corrected. Understandably, after more than 2 years, I have no hope that this will happen.
The experiments conducted with the colleagues from the forum (mainly with Nikon cameras) make me think that the problem is not a matter of quick correction. Rather, it requires an assessment of how to change the export menu so that users are aware of whether or not there is an color profile attached. An additional difficulty is that some cameras do not attach this profile, and this is what their company software does. This is the case with Nikon, I do not know if this applies to other manufacturers.
In all these cases, the PhotoLab should be able to offer an adequate solution.
The lack of action on the part of the developers leads to the fact that this problem appears periodically in the forum. My advice to those who have recently encountered the problem is to use a temporary solution. It’s no coincidence I say more than 2 years … it’s a long time for a software.

2. For unsatisfactory color management in a PhotoLab.
Recently, there have been requests for various features and topics for problems in the forum. Some of them are: Soft proofing, ProPhoto color space, high quality printing and others. I am increasingly realizing that they cannot be at a high level without the hi-end color management. This includes both a choice of work color space and various policies (for example, what to do if a file does not have a built-in profile).
It is extremely important that the photographer is able to configure these options according to his needs, and not be forced to use hard-coded settings.
On this issue, I am 100% sure that nothing will change, so I will not invest more time in this problem.
If even a colleague thinks about the role of color management in professional photography after reading this topic, then my time will not be wasted … you do not need to agree or disagree with me … just to think …

Thanks. I did read your links and your replies are appreciated. The end of the article about the Nikon profile does say that it might cause others a missing profile warning. As I said earlier, I did export with a Nikon profile which seemed to work. However, exporting with “sRGB Color Space Profile.icm” which I think is what you referred to, does not attach it, and the effect was exactly the same as just selecting sRGB instead of a custom profile.

Since the club competition system does assume sRGB if there is not an attached profile that says otherwise, and PL4 is correctly indicating it is sRGB in the EXIF data even if not attaching the profile, I might just put up with the warning the system gives me. Or I might try the Nikon profile on my next entry!

1 Like

I seriously doubt that Nikon is failing to attach a sRGB designation. There is no need to attach an actual sRGB profile as it’s a known public standard.

What is your goal here, Koko? To make colour management in Photolab as complex and unreliable as Photoshop? For print one needs CMYK. Presumably someone creating designs like T-shirts or other objects would not be using Photolab directly. Hence no need for Photolab to have those soft-proofing tools.

Almost everyone who has been through the “high end” colour space carousel after some years comes to the conclusion it’s a complete waste of time designed to separate them from their money and has their own horror stories of images turning out wrong, whether in print or on the web. DxO does their best to save us from ourselves.

For those who do want a different workflow: Photolab does process in AdobeRGB internally, will accept AdobeRGB RAW files and will export those files directly into AdobeRGB format. The missing link may be to calibrate one’s monitor to AdobeRGB (I have about 70% coverage of AdobeRGB as opposed to 100% coverage on sRGB). I really do not see what it is you lack. Photolab is not a dedicated printing app. Those people doing large scale printing with custom colour spaces would have existing workflows of applications which do soft-printing and CMYK separation very well. Mimicing it seems like the greatest possible effort for the least possible return for Photolab. Making a good product worse, as there will be so much misunderstanding of the preferences and ruined photos.

Steve, I admire and salute your pragmatism.

Alec, I also would like PhotoLab to be improved – and to be more precise, the Elite Edition.

1 Like

What is my goal? Do you think it’s easy for me to write in a language I don’t speak?
I tried to help the author of the topic to orient himself in his problem. Because I was helped more than 2 years ago. I was helped for 2 months before the support answered.
But I put an end. I have no more time to argue with you!
I, for my part, admire Joanna when she tries to write something about color management in this forum.

Pointless fussing over colour space and invisible colours is pretty much The Emperor’s New Clothes brought to life for a modern age. Intermediate photographers are easily sucked into believing mixing colour spaces would make a significant difference to their photography. The sexy names of those alternative colour spaces, AdobeRGB and ProPhoto RGB, make for a charming mystique.

Chasing invisible colours can afflict years of their creative lives, cost them many thousands of euros and leave them with worse images (the toll of constant conversion and mixed colour spaces). I’d hate to see that happen to more victims or to see PhotoLab kneecapped to chase unicorns. To effectively process wide gamut colours one must be able to see those colours.

As our interesting conversation revealed, PhotoLab makes it very easy to pursue a pure workflow from acquisition in either sRGB or AdobeRGB. As my monitors calibrate to 100% sRGB and just 80% AdobeRGB (and due to bad experiences in the past with mixing colour spaces), I stick to sRGB. The workflow is even purer with AdobeRGB. Acquisition, RAW development, output can all be in AdobeRGB. Curiously, specifying AdobeRGB in your camera as the acquisition colour space does not result in capturing any more data as the RAW data is the same and PhotoLab and other good RAW development tools ignore the attached profile when handling that RAW data and convert the RAW data with their own profile for that specific camera.

@tilltheendofeternity wrote a couple of years ago about his experience with PhotoLab and colour space and soft proofing:

For me PL2 is a start point as it produces the best RAW development of any app. After that I send the image to either NIK plugins, Luminar or Affinity for further work

I have a hardware calibrated monitor (100% sRGB, 98% Adobe) and the print company is use for prints specify all files to be sRGB. I soft proof using Affinity and the icc profiles supplied by the print company for the papers they use. So far, it all works fine as a process.

I would much rather have luminosity masking as that has the potential to impact every image that I work on. Soft proofing only matters when I physically print which isn’t that often.

Affinity Photo is just €50/$50 and it’s cross-platform. Anyone who wants soft proofing for printing literally can acquire such a tool (along with a first rate bitmap editor to replace Photoshop including HDR and panorama tools) for less than the price of an update.

There is a persuasive argument to be made on paper that the working colour space for PhotoLab should be ProPhoto RGB:

When you post-process a photo, you have to choose which working space you’re in. This is the color space your post-processing software restricts you to use; no edit you make can lead to a color found outside your chosen working space. In general, it is ideal that your working space is ProPhoto RGB when you edit a RAW photo. That’s because RAW photos often contain colors outside of both sRGB and Adobe RGB color spaces, especially in high-saturation shadow regions.

Two years ago @Wolfgang from DxO made a call for some real world example images where the AdobeRGB working colour space affected final output:

Indeed, it is currently impossible to get colors out of PhotoLab that are not contained in AdobeRGB. We are aware that this is a limitation, but frankly, there are not many colors in nature that do not fit inside AdobeRGB. If you encounter images that contain colors outside AdobeRGB, please share them so that we can raise the priority of this topic.

There was relative silence on this topic (one post referenced a theoretical gamut chart with no images). I would suggest anyone who wishes to martial support for changing the handling of colour spaces in PhotoLab come with some real world images which suffered from being processed in AdobeRGB and then printed (downloadable printable files please; screen tests won’t really do as almost no one will be able to see the invisible colours when converted to working monitor space).

Wolf made the case against exporting in ProPhoto RGB:

Technically, you can choose any ICC color profile for export, including ProPhotoRGB. But as you say, doing so does not make much sense. The ProPhotoRGB export will only contain colors that already existed in AdobeRGB.
– I use this ICC color profile feature when preparing images for a printing service that provides ICC profiles (e.g. Picto).
– For post-processing the image in a 3rd party image editor (e.g. Affinity Photo, Adobe Photoshop), I recommend to stick to AdobeRGB as it contains all information that is available in PhotoLab and avoids additional conversions.

Of course if PhotoLab’s working space were ProPhoto RGB, that would be the right space in which to export.

Colour spaces are an arms race:

  • sRGB is 35.9% of visible CIELAB
  • AdobeRGB is 52.1% of visible CIELAB
  • Wide-gamut Adobe RGB is 77.6% of visible CIELAB
  • ProPhoto RGB (Kodak) is 90% of visible CIELAB1

If DxO were to change their working colour space every time an improved colour space became fashionable, there would be far more issues with correct colour processing (gamut mismatches are awful) and no real world improvement. It’s possible the world has caught up to the point (advanced colour spaces are highly dependent on monitors on which to see that space and make the adjustments and pro printers able to print those colours), it would make sense to make the working space in PhotoLab ProPhoto RGB.

Before voting for such a time-consuming and significant change, I’d like to see something more than theoretical gamut charts.

Until then, if you can’t see it, you can’t correct it.


  1. Does anyone else find it poetically ironic that Kodak’s last significant contribution to industry science before declaring bankruptcy was revealing the perfect colour space?

Alec, no need to rant. – I also would like PL to be improved, the Elite version.

I still have this very old LightRoom 5.7, which is working internally with a wide colour space (something like ‘Melissa’, very similar to ProPhoto). And everybody exports to the colour space one wants, with perceptual or relative colorimetric rendering – not at all causing problems.

When in SoftProof mode, the blackpoint clipping warning turns into a warning
when exeeding the monitor’s colour range (e.g. sRGB)
Screen Shot 10-14-21 at 02.47 PM

and the white point clipping warning into when exceeding the target’s colour range
(e.g. Tecco PCR 310, a distinct matte FineArt paper with a custom profile for my Epson P800).
Screen Shot 10-14-21 at 02.48 PM

When this old version can handle colour space and softproof since ages, why not the expensive PhotoLab Elite?

Wolfgang, this conversation has stimulated me to do some additional research and it looks like it may indeed be time to upgrade the working colour space to ProPhoto RGB, although it seems doing so is unlikely to improve many images but there will be edge cases where it will. All this talk of settings dialogues and multiple internal spaces remains a way to senseless complexity,

Soft proofing is another question. Both the Lightroom system and the CaptureOne system for managing soft-proofed images are clunky and awkward. For those who want to do high end printing, adding Affinity Photo to one’s arsenal and learning to soft proof with Photo is no more complex than learning to use the soft proofing tools in Lightroom and CaptureOne.

There’s room for DxO to do soft proofing better, automatically creating a secondary file with just the adjustments for print but which would continue to mirror the core adjustments of the original master image. In the image browser, DxO could add a checkbox for Print Versions which would show or hide all of the child soft-proofed versions. Alas, the soft-proof crowd would probably complain that they would like to create completely independent versions for each end point. At that point, the simplicity of PhotoLab would collapse and soft-proofing would be the same complex mess that it is in Lightroom and CaptureOne.

With clunky soft-proofing like in Lightroom and CaptureOne, one may as well do soft-proofing in an external application.

A lot of people have spoken highly of Qimage for soft proofing and printing. It appears to be a major printing package and might be a good answer if DXO doesn’t do more in that area with the upcoming PL5.

1 Like

The Windows site looks terrifying (to a Mac user) but there’s a newer version Qimage One which runs on Mac and seems to offer exactly the tools needed for creating print versions from screen masters. If DxO decides to add soft proofing to PhotoLab, they could do worse to start with what Qimage does. Frankly keeping these activities separate – developing master files from RAW and soft proofing for print – seems likely to result in better programs and clearer interface on both sides.

Good suggestion.

1 Like

That’s the way I feel when looking at anything ‘Apple’! :slight_smile:

Thank you.

1 Like