When I upload my pictures online they become darker and pallid, does anyone know why?

<p>I am editing photographs to make a website. In the past when I have put images on my-space or face-book they become darker and pallid. It looks like I darkened them about 4 points and de-saturated them 15 or 20 points. Will this happen once I put them on a website as well? Does anyone know why this happens? My files are on RGB. Thank you.</p>

<p>If your image color profiles are now Adobe RGB, you should convert them to sRGB before uploading. That should make a difference.</p>

<p>If William is wrong (hes right, but I am not sure if you are in adobeRGB) the other reason may be that your internet browser isnt a color managed application, so it doesnt reflect the calibration profile on your monitor. I think firefox is color managed, but I am not sure... google around and try a color managed browser to see if it helps.</p>

<p>Convert and save to sRGB any JPEGs you plan to upload for most online use. Especially for social networking sites, generalized photo hosting sites like Photobucket, or most web use or e-mailing. The vast majority of people who will be viewing those photos won't know about color management issues and shouldn't have to become experts in digital photography issues just to view photos as you intend. For now there's very little reason for most people to use the color management option in browsers like Firefox 3.x.</p>

<p>The other factor - system calibration - can be resolved for now with a cheap and simple solution: use automatic editing tools in software like Picasa (free), or the various PictoColor iCorrect programs (free trialware, but costs to use licensed version). These will come very close to creating JPEGs with appropriate color and brightness for typical web use, even if your computer system is not calibrated. It's a very compromised solution, obviously, but will work well enough for most casual online needs. I recommend these programs to family and friends who are not photo hobbyists. Besides not wanting or needing to calibrate their systems, it would be a hopeless task for the typical family computer where one family member may adjust the screen brightness and color to suit a video game, another may change it for watching DVDs or YouTube, and still another may decrease the brightness for comfortable viewing of predominantly white pages such as photo.net's.</p>

<p>Hi Tara- there are any number of reasons this is happening but one of the most common I found in a number of years of teaching this stuff is over processing. Try this... take an image directly from the camera with no processing at all save for reducing it in size, upload it, see what it looks like on a computer that generally renders images well, and go from there.</p>