Color gets dull: opencv cv2.imread cv2.imwrite

Question

I am using opencv module to read and write the image. here is the code and below is the image i am reading and second image is after saving it on disk using cv2.imwrite().

import cv2

img = cv2.imread('originalImage.jpg')
cv2.imwrite('test.jpg',img)

It is significantly visible that colors are dull in second image. Is there any workaround to this problem or I am missing on some sort of setting parameters..?

Answer 1

The difference is that the initial image (on the left in the diagram) has an attached ICC profile whereas the second one (on the right) does not.

I obtained the above image by running the ImageMagick utility called identify like this:

identify -verbose first.jpg    > 1.txt
identify -verbose second.jpg   > 2.txt

Then I ran the brilliant opendiff tool (which is part of macOS) like this:

opendiff [12].txt

You can extract the ICC profile from the first image also with ImageMagick like this:

convert first.jpg profile.icc