jpg compression quality in windows 7 poorer than xp

I also experience that Windows 7 displays jpeg images with less quality, but for me the problem is only visible in Windows default photo viewer program and Firefox. Images are displayed correctly in Paint and Internet Explorer. See the attached image for an obvious example.

I'm not talking about zooming. This problem is visible both in 100% view (1:1) and reduzed size to fit screen. To me the default photo viewer is now useless. I used it a lot to verify my exports from Lightroom. Now it displays crap.

I believe that the difference you are seeing there has to do with programs that do and do not use the the color profiles.

I find that the default color profiles shipped with monitors and other software are complete garbage and any program that uses them gives you cruddy results.

This is made even more complex and random by the fact that your jpgs may or may not have embedded profiles. And programs that use the ICM system will then either use the embedded one or the default SRGB one. And results could looks better or worse either way!

So unless you are using a real ICM system tuner and really are trying to match an exact paper output, I would essentially turn it all off. Get rid of any color profiles for your monitor. Do NOT save any profiles with your jpegs and make sure that even if ther is no embedded profile that you convert your jpegs to "sRGB" in lightroom or photoshop before you save them or your images will look different not only in different apps on your computer but on other peoples computers.

Now I KNOW that the use of profiles are supposed to remove variability between machines byut the problem is that everyones machines are so badly set up for using it that it actually increases variability tremendously! They are really only good if you are REALLY trying to match output on an exact paper/process type from a known printer only. And for home work, most printers, even good ones seem to do best if your images are in sRGB as that is the normal case with people printing at home so the profiles for the printer are all highly tuned for that.

So.

1) Look in your display/monitors color control folder and remove all profiles.
2) Before exporting to jpeg for use on the web or anything else, convert you images from adobe or whatever other color space they may be to sRGB. (Photoshop definately does this and lightroom should too)
3) Do not save profiles in your jpgs.

With all that the images should appear the same, on the same monitor, in any program you use. Though they will change hue slightly from monitor to monitor and they will gain or lose saturation from mointor to monitor if you are looking at them between a good quality TFT and a craptactular but almost totally unavoidable TN panels in use on most all computers and laptops today...

Thanks for your long reply, but the image shown in my example IS in fact in sRGB.

I don't use any special color corrections or profiles, but I'll take a look at that folder.

Yeah, make sure your monitors do not have any profiles attached to them.

I hada really bad case once where I installed a monitor profile for one of two monitors and not the other. The profile made everything turn yellow. It became super obvious which programs used the ICM system and which didn't. The windows photo viewer definately did, even the white part of the viewer background turned yellpowish the profile was so off. On one monitor it was all yellow and on the other monitor it was fine.

So I was guessing that the photo viewer was using a profile and causing your colors to get all blotchy (And the blue on the color is a completely different color in each one). The Q was where. Possibly a monitor profile or possibly one embedded in the jpeg.

Color profiles and jpeg display quality are two completely different issues. This thread is about the obvious quality and smoothing differences in Windows 7, which doesn't depend on any color profile. We need to make that clear so people don't get confused.

Yeah this really does look like a seperate issue from the original (and rather old) thread. Would deserve it's own thread.

I replied to this thread because it was the only one I found that seemed to adress the problem I'm having.

Maybe I wasn't clear in my initial post so I'll try to clarify.

I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
The image you see is a jpeg exported from Lightroom 3.3 with sRGB color profile.
The original image is a TIFF file created with Vuescan with sRGB setting.
The file is opened and displayed in two different programs: Paint and Windows default photo viewer.
They are displayed in 1:1 size, that is original size, no enlargement and no shrinking.

As you can clearly see, Windows default photo viewer program seem to distort the image color wise. The man looks as he's having some kind of skin illness.

I don't see this problem in XP nor in Vista (both 32 bit).

If you still feel this belongs to another thread, could you point me in the right direction?

Well basically you just create your own new thread :)

Though for the most part I believe that we've gotten to the root of it anyway. The difference is the use or not use of the Windows ICM system by individual programs (Which the viewer in XP probably didn't use at all).

You may need to tame the ICM system some or disable it's use on your monitor to stop it from happening. Or as you said, don't use the built in picture viewer. Though since removing the profiles from my monitor setings, I've found the problem gone on my system using the built in viewer.