I've been having some issues with colour management in PixInsight recently. I've got a newish mac that I'm doing my processing on and it has a DCI-P3 display which is relatively wide gamut.
I haven't done much imaging since getting this new computer so I only noticed the issue in my recent image of NGC 5078.
The problem is that when I view the image in PixInsight it looks fine, but when I export the image it looks noisy and posterized in both Preview and Chrome. It looked so terrible that when I first saw the image I uploaded to Astrobin I panicked and deleted it... it looked
bad. I ended up changing my processing so that it just looked not great instead of
terrible but in doing so compromised the image.
My workflow was basically to process the image without a profile, then once I was done with it use ICCProfileTransformation to convert it to sRGB 2.1 When saving the image I've tried both embedding the profile and not as I read that historically some browsers had bugs when any profile was embedded and that they work best if you have it untagged but in sRGB.
I've also tried converting the image to my monitor's profile using ICCPT and then saving the image with that profile. When I do that it looks perfect in Preview.
I've enabled colour management and colour proofing in PI and still it's fine inside PixInsight but bad outside of it. Colour proofing is set up to use sRGB 2.1, with BPC. Proofing intent is perceptual.
So the image looks fine in PI. It looks fine when I save the image and then reopen it in PI. It looks bad in Preview and in Chrome. I believe Chrome is now colour managed and Preview definitely is... for those not familiar with Preview on mac it's the standard image viewer and it too has soft proofing options built in. I now have no confidence at all in what other people might be seeing.
I've uploaded a
comparison to Astrobin -- you may need your monitor brightness turned up relatively high to appreciate the full difference. The comparison was made by exporting the image once with an sRGB profile and once with my monitor's profile and then opening them up side-by-side with Preview.
I should also mention that the monitor is calibrated using a Spyder.
Any help would be much appreciated.