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Zagorath @aussie.zone

Why is an image exported from GIMP much, much darker than it should be?

I was going to write a bug report for this on the official bug tracker, but their system is so fucking terrible I literally can't sign up despite them having two entire separate pages for creating accounts. One just silently fails, and the other accuses me of being malicious or using a VPN. So I guess they don't really want people contributing.

Here's what my image looks like in GIMP:

And here it is, after exporting as a JPG:

With these settings:

10 comments

  • Have you tried the "Save color profile" box?

    Also, does this happen if you edit a Jpeg and export to Jpeg again?

    Also check the Preferences>Color Management menu to make sure the editor uses the same color space as the jpeg you're exporting

    • does this happen if you edit a Jpeg and export to Jpeg again?

      The photo in question started out as a jpeg. To be more precise, I did "open as layers" on a bunch of jpegs straight off my camera, then applied some masks and blending, then exported back out as jpeg.

      Then opened the RAWs of those same images into Darktable, applied some processing, exported those out as jpegs, brought the processed jpegs into GIMP and applied the exact same masks and blending as in the SooC jpegs. I tried exporting both versions, and both have the same "much darker than it should be" output result.

      My Color Management settings look like this:

      The export settings are back in the OP. I haven't touched any settings relating to colour spaces, so my expectation would be that it should all just work. (i.e., even if there's a solution we can find that fixes it for me, it's still a bug that they should fix, because the normal expectation is that a user who doesn't fiddle with those settings probably just wants it to look how it looks on their display.)

  • Does the exported file look the same in all other applications that you open it in? Not all image viewers are colour-managed and may not pick up the ICC profile of the image (assuming you embedded one when exporting).

    Edit: looking at your settings screenshots it doesn't look like you're managing colour. Make sure your images are exported from your RAW developer and GIMP with a profile. sRGB is good for most uses.

    • Does the exported file look the same in all other applications that you open it in?

      I've opened in the default Windows photo viewing app, in Firefox, and in Edge. All show the same weirdly-dark picture. And it would be an even bigger error on GIMP's part if that weren't the case...if it were outputting photos that look wildly different on different extremely common, standard photo viewing apps.

      it doesn’t look like you’re managing colour

      Well, know. I don't know how to do that. I can't even see what setting would do that. This is the sort of thing that should just work out of the box, and at the moment I'm struggling to even see an option that could be used to fix it. The export window doesn't have a "colour profile" option, and the global settings' "preferred profiles" options don't have a very clear application, and don't actually have any options other than "None".

      The only other option is "Select color profile from disk...", which then opens an explorer window for me to import my own custom settings.

      Incidentally, the docs say:

      RGB profile

      Default is “None”, which causes the built-in RGB profile to be used. You can select another RGB working space color profile from disk: it will be offered next to the built-in profile when a color profile can be chosen.

      Grayscale profile

      Default is “None”, which causes the built-in Grayscale profile to be used. You can select another Grayscale working space color profile from disk: it will be offered next to the built-in profile when a Grayscale profile can be chosen.

      CMYK profile

      Default is “None”. You can select a CMYK working space color profile from disk to convert RGB to CMYK.

      So this seems like it should be fine?

  • Damn, I had the same or similar problem when I used gimp the other day, I had to merge down all layers before exporting to fix it, no idea why.

10 comments