Is IrfanView an accurate color picture viewer?

[faye]

hi ...

I know irfanview 4.10 is a very fast instant picture viewer. but is the color it shows as accurate as the professional graphics programs like photoshop?

how does irfanview compare to windows normal picture viewer(windows picture and fax viewer"?

 

[QuixoticOne]

Originally posted by: faye
hi ...

I know irfanview 4.10 is a very fast instant picture viewer. but is the color it shows as accurate as the professional graphics programs like photoshop?

how does irfanview compare to windows normal picture viewer(windows picture and fax viewer"?

Almost ANY halfway decent 3rd party viewer is going to be superior in several senses to Windows built in viewer. I could go into lots of comparative reasons, but I have to go, so I'll generalize.

What you appear to be asking about accurate color essentially is equivalent to "can I use irfanview in a color managed workflow" to see accurate colors. There are several facets you should understand about the way this can work with any viewer.

a) The original image file has a certain "color space" encoding to it either explicitly (specified by the file or by the process which created it), or implicitly (there is no known / specified color space for the file, so essentially you must "guess" what the proper default is likely to be).

b) The most common color space for images on the web as well as in general windows PCs is what is known as SRGB color space which corresponds to roughly a color temperature of 5500 degrees Kelvin, an overall approximate gamma of approximately 2.2 (actually it varies a bit but that's close overall). Specifically they assumed that the average person would NOT have a color calibrated monitor or color correction software so they just tried to find out what the AVERAGE RGB type *CRT* (NOTE THIS IS NOT THE SAME FOR LCDs!) display characteristics of brightness and color versus input pixel RGB numbers are and they tried to model that average characteristic as the SRGB standard. Thus if you don't have a calibrated CRT/LCD and you display an SRGB format image it should look "close to correct" on many monitors.

c) There are other not-so-common color space encodings like Adobe 1998, et. al. for images, or images that have default gamma values of other numbers like 1.8 or whatever.

d) If an image file like a TIFF or JPEG has information inside it that explicitly tells the viewer WHAT the source image's color space is, the viewer can use that information to more accurately interpret and display that image's colors on your SPECIFIC monitor.

e) If an image file has no explicitly specified color space defined ANY viewer can at best "guess" what it is or rely on the user to specify what color space to associate with the image when displaying it.

f) So an image viewer that is capable of being TOLD (by you) what color space to use for an existing image, or is capable of reading color space information from an image containing it, and which uses that information to DISPLAY the image in best fidelity on a color calibrated monitor is called a "color management aware" application.

g) If you don't have a specific "color profile" either a good DEFAULT one for your MODEL of monitor, or a specifically made one for YOUR OWN monitor, all any application can do is "guess" what type of colors and brightnesses your monitor will display given a certain input pixel. There will be errors depending on your room lighting, how your monitor controls are set, etc. So even a color managed viewer program is not going to help you see accurate colors unless your monitor is at least reasonably closely calibrated to some known color profile. In the absense of a specific other one, SRGB is a common default, but your controls can easily set the monitor to be something totally different, and if even the best color managed viewer was used you'd never get accurately displayed colors because the monitor is doing something totally unknown / unexpected with its color settings that the viewer program doesn't know about.

h) Since I said SRGB is a common color profile for most input images, and it is a commonly good estimate for what most PC monitors at their default settings display, even if you don't use a color management aware OS or viewer program and don't have a specific color profile for your monitor, if you set the monitor to "SRGB" compatible default settings and view a SRGB color space image (even if that's just the default without any software explicitly realizing that), chances are the colors will be mostly "close".

i) If you have a well calibrated color profiled monitor that is set to match a SRGB color profile, you don't need to use a color management aware OS or viewer to accurately view images that happen to be in SRGB color space because they wouldn't need any correction to display properly on your monitor since your monitor is set closely to SRGB.

j) If you want to be able to open / view images in any color space e.g. Adobe 1998, SRGB, Gamma 1.8, Gamma 2.2, whatever, you MUST use a color management aware viewer and/or OS so that it can convert.the colors in the file to colors that match your monitor's settings.

k) So for the best color accurate display regardless of the input image you SHOULD get a calibration for your monitor, you SHOULD use an color management aware viewer application.

l) For around $60 you can buy a low-end color calibrator hardware device to help calibrate your monitor so it'll display better accuracy colors than would be possible otherwise by just guessing and manually estimating the settings.
A Pantone HUEY would be such a device, or a ColorVision SPYDER.

 

[corkyg]

The color it shows largely depends on your monitor's color calibration settings. Within those parameters, Irfanview does a very good job.

 

[martensite]

On my dell 24", the colors look much more saturated in irfanview than they do in Photoshop. -snip-
(EDIT: Ignore this post. I dont recall what the PS settings are, at the moment.)