Uploaded Colors not good with Adobe Raw/Photoshop combo

I process my raw images in Adobe Camera Raw. It seems that if I do anything additional in Photoshop and save the image, upon upload I loose the contrast and saturation back to the original raw appearance in the uploaded image. The image saved via Photoshop still looks great on my computer. Why do they look great on my computer in the saved file but when I preview an upload (to the POTW contest for instance!) the colors are washed out? I think I've read somewhere that the edits are really in a "sidecar" file and haven't really changed the actual image; therefore I suspect the sidecar data is lost or unread upon uploading. How do I save the image with changes to the actual file? This issue doesn't seem to arise when the image is processed using ACR alone.

How are you viewing the images on your computer? How are you viewing them online.

One possibility is colour management. Some browsers, e.g. Internet Explorer don't do proper colour management and so won't display your images correctly, especially if you have an embedded colour profile. Firefox does do colour management but it is not always on by default.

The sidecar files (XMP) should only apply settings to raw images, not the final format you are saving in after processing in Photoshop.

I convert my RAW files to Adobe DNG format, the settings are then written into the raw file and I don't have to worry about remembering to copy the XMP files.

Within the DNG the adjustments work in the same way as XMP and can be removed or changed using Camera Raw at any time.

I also think the root of your problem is colour space, I think you should try the "Save for Web" option within Photoshop to save and display an image online to see if that works as that should take care of the colour space for you.

Adobe RGB files always appear less saturated when displayed in a browser. Is that your problem? If so, convert the image to sRGB and tweak the saturation a bit (an s-shaped tone curve helps).

Tim

I changed the raw files to DNG and that didn't help, BUT using the "Save for Web" option (once I reduced the file size) did the trick. Thanks for the tip! I had long ago read in Scott Kelby's book that it was preferred to convert files to DNG, but somehow had completely forgotten this bit of info. Also I was using Adobe RGB but this wasn't a slight desaturation at all. It was like I never processed the image. I will remember the sRGB format next time also.

Thanks so much for the input guys!