What is the best way to work with color settings in Photoshop? Here are current settings caught in a screen capture... Should I even worry about this? What should I set the RGB to? I have icc profiles for my scanners, my printer, and a couple of digital printing services, as well as for my monitor..... I've always found this part of the image workflow setup to be confusing. Or should I only change these when I know what I'm going to be printing to? Which means that work done in a certain profile will have to be reworked to be ready to print elsewhere....... *sigh*

I am, therefore I create.......
--- michelleamarante.com

Gee! Thanks a lot, Michelle. I never saw this color settings dialog before... Now I have something entirely new to worry about. [Two monitors that look nothing alike. Gamma settings, Eyes going bad...]

Thanks David.... I have changed this to Adobe...but now I notice when I save an image for web, the colors shift... Oh I cannot have this obvious difference going on! It will make me absolutely nuts.......

I am, therefore I create.......
--- michelleamarante.com

Heh! Sorry Misha..... didn't mean to cause another headache...now I have to figure out why the change to Adobe has caused the big difference in jpg output..... grrrr....

I am, therefore I create.......
--- michelleamarante.com

Donald... Help!

Ok this is really weird.... I've just opened up the jpg and the psd file side by side in PS and now they look fine. When I had saved it a few minutes ago it looked different...I must be losing my mind.... but my husband was standing right next to me when I did it and he noticed it too! WTH?

I am, therefore I create.......
--- michelleamarante.com

Michelle. What version of Windows? These are my settings and I do all my printing changes with the print profiles. Magick Michael

Windows ME is what I'm using Mike.... usually what I do is I have those settings shown above, and then when there is an image I want to print I change it to my printer profile. Invariably I end up having to do levels adjustments etc, before printing. It's annoying.... But I understand that the Adobe working space is better to use. And it is the color space I use when downloading images off my Dimage as well. So I might as well have it set to that as default.

I am, therefore I create.......
--- michelleamarante.com

Attached Link: http://www.zhounder.com/photogalleries/peopleg1_117.htm

I would stick to the web settings then use your ICC's in your output profiles. I know with mine I have to lighten some of my darker shots by 10% or so. An example is the link above. The image is just the way I like it on the web but when I print it it gets too dark. Lighten it by 10% and its identical. This took some adjusting in PS output profiles along with the lightening but now it works great. Another issue that you may have is Win ME. I hate to say it but it is the most unstable OS minilimp has ever put out. I would suggest Win2k or Win'98SE. ME could be a very large part of your problems including the lightness/darkness issue of your monitor you have had in the past.

Ahh...possibly WinMe is the problem....came with the computer, before that I was using Win95. And I hate XP, my husband has it on his laptop, it's such an intrusive piece shit... I have just the opposite problem when printing....I have to darken everything.

I am, therefore I create.......
--- michelleamarante.com

Yea, I'm AdobeRGB all the way. There are wider gamuts, but Adobe suits me pretty fine. When you save your image to the web, are you just doing that (doing "Save for Web") and nothing else or are you converting it. If you just switch to another workspace or just do "save for web" the software simply throws information away, which is why it doesn't look the way you'd think. I do all my editing/correcting while in the AdobeRGB colorspace. Once it looks right, I save that to a .TIF file (Zip mode). This one I can now output to higher gamut devices like printers. I then convert the image to sRGB for web use. Go to IMAGE > MODE > CONVERT TO PROFILE. The "Source Space" should say AdobeRGB(1998) or whichever one you use. Now set the "Destination Space" profile to sRGB IEC6..blah blah blah (forget all the numbers). Under conversion options, most of the time you should have the engine set to Adobe (ACE) and black point compression selected. The intent is up to you. Most people say use "relative colorimetric" and for something things I do, but I sometimes feel Perceptual is better for what we do (will talk about that in a bit). Depending on the colors in your image, you may see a slight change in the image, but it won't be a huge amount as the gamut is converted. Remember, only go in this direction. Going back the other way is like going from 16-bit/channel to 8-bit and then back to 16-bit. You don't gain anything back. Most of what I say above is the default and you should just be able to choose sRGB on the conversion and go. Just to throw a little more into it, here's what the different Intent settings do (remember that you can pretty much interchange the words gamut and colorspace/color workspace): Perceptual - This is the one I think fits more with what we do. This mode basically renders the stuff that would be out-of-gamut so that all the colors maintain the same visual relationship. Sort of like shrinking the gamut down to fit so that visually it looks the same as before you switched it. Saturation - Preserves the saturation of the colors, but it does it by sacrificing the hue and lightness. So your colors are nice and bold, but the rest well ... depends on the colorspaces and colors in the image. I once read that this is good for doing presentations where bright colors are more important than color correctness. Relative Colorimetric - the default; it maps the colors that are out-of-gamut to the nearest in-gamut color. Because of that, you can get slight shifts in color like I mention above because it's not concerned with the visual perception, but a straight mathematical relationship. Absolute Colorimetric - maps gamut to the other directly without making any adjustments to black or white points. Good for design stuff, but will screw with a photographic image. Hope that helps and hopefully not too much tech-speak. Lemme know if I confused or was unclear. -=>Donald

this was a window i never saw eoither!!!! it will be precious for the incoming PS work I am doing! (a colouring onto a quite peculiar sketch I am making currently). Michelle, Thank YOU. There's something always worthy goin around here :)

hummm... first of all... I would like to know how your monitor is calibrated. Excluding the fact that you are using windows the calibration is almost casual in its precision... but something like a more refined calibration can be done in few easy steps. In general... if you doesn't have your monitor calibrated the color profiles of photoshop means little... coz you don't see the result close enough. So... what are your monitor settings? White temperature and so on... which monitor are you using?

I think we may be building a tutorial here... But so far all of the words are not coming together. I use the Adobe Gamma applet in the control panel to adjust monitor. It only seems to affect the "main" monitor in a dual monitor setup. The "Display" applet in the control panel does have advanced settings which seem to allow setting color balance and gamma for each monitor individually. I have no idea how this interacts with the Adobe applet. This Display dialog also "associates color profiles with this device." Several can be loaded, but one is set as default. I have no idea how this interacts with the gamuts used in Photoshop, or the web browser for that matter. Each monitor also has hardware controls for setting brightness, contrast, color balance, and whitepoint temperature. I set contrast to maximum as instructed by Adobe. I set brightness using a set of gray-scale patches. The color balance uses factory defaults. For whitepoint temperature, I tend to use the warmest of the three settings, as the others look too blue for me. My room lighting is a combination of daylight and crappy shop flourescent, which of course varies as the sun goes down. There is an Epson inkjet printer that has its own set of controls depending on what paper I'm using. I really don't print much, but tend to always use the same premium glossy paper. There is a checkbox labeled something obscure like "Color Enhancement" with no documentation anywhere that I can find. The Nikon film scanner, and the HP flatbed, may have their own controls hidden somewhere... After all of this... do ANY of the pics in my Gallery look OK?

I've seen this brought up a few times when we've talked about color or brightness shifts when dealing with different colorspaces/programs. While calibration is a very important step in color management, I don't think it applies in this situation. In monitor calibration, you are trying to standardize your brightness and color neutrality so that if you opened the same image on two different monitors (or output it to a printing device) the images would look the same. If there's a calibration problem, opening the same image on different monitors yields a shift in brightness and/or color. With gamut problems, opening the same image on the same monitor with different gamuts gives you a brightness and/or color shift. Now I could imagine a case where it could effect it. But you'd have to have a somewhat large miscalibration where one of the three color gammas was shifted so far out of alignment with the other two that when the gamut was changed it changed the overall shape of the destination gamut. You would be able to notice a miscal like this easily from a colorcast in the whites and grays ("wow...my whites look blue"). Doesn't happen to that extreme all that often. At work, I use a Graesby Colorimeter to precisely adjust 24" color proofing monitors to match the color brightness/temperature to the lighting of the press room (luminance or b&w component) and then adjust color fidelity to match inks on our color of newsprint(chrominance). For most people at home, we are just guessing really (unless you have something like a Monitor Spyder). You are counting on your eyes to do the calibration. Problem is, we all see b&w and colors a little bit differently. Some people are more sensitive to blue, others red, etc. We also subconciously prefer colors to be a certain way. Some of us like warmer tones while some colder and that will effect what we see as a "neutral" gray when doing the calibration. So there are going to be variations across all our monitors that we all just have to live with. -=>Donald

Oh yea, I almost forgot to mention that when I talk brightness I am talking about the black and white points as well as the overall intensity. Make sense? -=>Donald