All my gens are done 100% locally, and my setup runs forge neo (and previously reforge) within firefox. What would happen is that when I would pass an image onto the img2img tab for any inpainting/upscaling work, the entire image would have significantly duller colors. When opening the same image in my file explorer, it would be totally fine, but within img2img it would desaturate the whole thing. This would happen with both raw txt2img gens and any GIMP exports I would make (for example, when manually correcting something in a raw txt2img gen).

Doing the same thing with the same files worked perfectly in edge, but I didn't want to use it as I just prefer firefox for everything. I also knew from this that there was nothing wrong with the image file itself.

Long story short, the issue lies within the color profile of your images and how the browser you use renders it. Forge's python library renders images in a way that only uses the raw pixel data, which makes them look less saturated. This is because the images I was using have an ICC color profile embedded in their data, which is a usually totally standard and supported thing, but python just ignores that profile and draws the image differently.

I tried exporting my GIMP edits differently by manually setting the color profile but it didn't work. In the end I fixed the issue within firefox by going to about:config and setting "gfx.color_management.force_srgb" to true. After a restart, everything was working and my images would view consistantly across firefox and my photo viewer. Now all my outputs are colorful as they should be. I have no idea if anyone else has run into this issue, but give this a shot.

Step 1 - txt2img

masterpiece, best quality, newest,
KittySoftpaws, green sash, brown boots, white fur on chest, black fur, <lora:Kitty_Softpaws_Illustrious:0.55>,
solo, lying, on back, spread legs, pussy, anus, looking at viewer, spread pussy, clitoris, pussy focus, close-up, paws, smile, grasslands, against tree,
colorful theme, (night:1.4), (dark:1.6), (cool colors:1.4), (scenery:2),
Negative prompt: worst quality,
Steps: 35, Sampler: DPM++ 2M, Schedule type: Align Your Steps, CFG scale: 5.5, Seed: 3341182052, Size: 1024x1024, Model hash: befc694a29, Model: waiIllustriousSDXL_v150, RNG: CPU, Style Selector Enabled: True, Style Selector Randomize: False, Style Selector Style: base, Lora hashes: "Kitty_Softpaws_Illustrious: a7a905bfca0b", Rescale CFG: 0.7, Version: neo, Module 1: sdxl_vae

Step 2 - img2img

masterpiece, best quality, newest,
KittySoftpaws, green sash, brown boots, white fur on chest, black fur, <lora:Kitty_Softpaws_Illustrious:0.55>,
solo, lying, on back, spread legs, pussy, anus, looking at viewer, spread pussy, clitoris, pussy focus, close-up, paws, smile, grasslands, against tree,
colorful theme, (night:1.4), (dark:1.6), (cool colors:1.4), (scenery:2),
Negative prompt: worst quality,
Steps: 30, Sampler: Euler a, Schedule type: Align Your Steps, CFG scale: 5.5, Seed: 658326088, Size: 2048x2048, Model hash: befc694a29, Model: waiIllustriousSDXL_v150, Denoising strength: 0.25, Init image hash: 1d7416ed7e5b0c5e26609ec3422b207f, RNG: CPU, Style Selector Enabled: True, Style Selector Randomize: False, Style Selector Style: base, Lora hashes: "Kitty_Softpaws_Illustrious: a7a905bfca0b", Rescale CFG: 0.7, Version: neo, Module 1: sdxl_vae