A friend who makes leather goods complained to me last year, saying that the product pictures he took looked dark brown on the computer, but when uploaded to Amazon, they turned into a reddish brown color. He thought Amazon had compressed the image and tried several upload methods to no avail. Later, I went to check it out for him and found that the problem was in the color space.
His camera is set to the Adobe RGB color space by default, and the photos he takes have a wide color gamut. But the software he used to export the image defaulted to sRGB, so a color space conversion occurred in the process. During the conversion, the original dark brown color in Adobe RGB was mapped to the closest color in sRGB—but that color was redder.
The root of the problem is: Adobe RGB has a wider color gamut than sRGB. If you force a wide color gamut color into a narrow color gamut, some color information will definitely be lost. This is not Amazon's problem, it's physically impossible to convert losslessly.
The correct approach for e-commerce images is to use sRGB throughout. The camera is set to sRGB mode for shooting, the photo editing software sets sRGB as the working space, and the sRGB color profile is embedded when exporting. Although doing this sacrifices some color expression, it can ensure consistent color on all devices and platforms. For e-commerce, consistency is much more important than color gamut width.
If you shoot in RAW format, you can freely choose to export the color space in the post-production software. Lightroom has a color space option by default when exporting, just select sRGB. Photoshop's "Export for Web" defaults to sRGB plus embedded configuration file, just use this function to export.
There is another point that is easily overlooked: the calibration of the monitor. If your monitor has a bluish tint, you will subconsciously turn the image yellow when retouching it. The result looks yellow on other people's normal screens. Spend a few hundred dollars to buy a screen color calibrator (such as Spyder or i1Display) and calibrate your monitor every two months. For product photography, the return on investment is higher than changing lenses.
The situation of taking pictures with mobile phones is quite special. By default, the iPhone shoots in the Display P3 color space, not sRGB. If you take a product picture with an iPhone and upload it directly, the color will look correct on a device that supports P3 (such as another iPhone), but it will look color cast on an ordinary computer screen that does not support P3. The solution is: change the camera format to "Best Compatibility" in the iPhone settings, or use a tool to convert the image to sRGB after taking the photo.
There is also a concept called "color profile". Many people confuse "embed color profile" and "convert to sRGB". Embedding refers to telling the device that reads this image "what color space I am", but does not change the color data of the image itself. Conversion is the actual mapping of color data to the target color space. What e-commerce pictures need is "convert to sRGB and embed sRGB configuration file".
Finally, let me talk about a counter-intuitive thing: if your pictures are sold on multiple platforms, the image processing engines of different platforms may perform differently in color management. Amazon's image processing will preserve the embedded color profile, but may discard it when the thumbnail is generated. eBay sometimes does its own color conversion for images in PNG format. So even if the image you upload is correct sRGB, the thumbnail the end user sees may have color differences. There is no way to fully control this, you can only check it after uploading.
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