Just look at the difference:

ORIGINAL

RESULT

David, yes, we reduce the image quality to 80%, in order to low the load on the server

you can see the methods in the ow_plugins/photo/bol/photo_temporary_service.php

lines 136-188

and you can set the image quality to 100% in here: ow_utilities/image.php

const IMAGE_QUALITY = 80;

Also we check the images you sent us are absolutely similar we do not see any difference. 

Also probably the fading gamma you're referring to is definition of the image. In this case I believe you're referring to the time when the image loads, it remains washed out for a little until the image totally loads is the effect we use. 

Ross.

IMAGE_QUALITY does not any matters depending on Color displaying of photos in your script.

IMAGE_QUALITY affects on pixel structure only.

The general reason is that your devs use very old PHP library - WideImage whose the last release 11.02.19 was on February 19th, 2011 (it's unbelievable!)

And WideImage using GD library only, not ImageMagic. But GD does NOT support ICC color Profiles, especially Adobe RGB (1998) that professional photographers really frequently use.

And thus our photos look much dimmer than their original right after full uploading not temporary!..

We offer you to change that very old library WideImage (not supported anymore) on some new popular image manipulation PHP library that use and GD and ImageMagic libs by choice of Oxwall script site admin in main settings!

And I post 2 pics BEFORE and AFTER uploading once again (open full size!). Please look very carefully, the COLOR difference (not pixel quality) is obvious:

This is a custom code modification. 

You can post your suggestion on uservoice. 

You can hire a programmer to do that for you: http://www.oxwall.org/market/specialists

David,

I also have some problems with butchered Images. First of all I used image quality 100% and avoided resizes if not needed. But still the WideImage library butchers the stuff. So I wonder:

Quote from David 

We offer you to change that very old library WideImage (not supported anymore) on some new popular image manipulation PHP library that use and GD and ImageMagic libs by choice of Oxwall script site admin in main settings!

Do you mean you offer a patch or do you mean you ask for a enhancement/fix? If you have a patch I would be interested, otherwise I think UTIL_Image can pretty easy be changed to use imagemagik. I will prepare some Pull Request for the improvements.

Gruss
Bernd