Any photoshop experts on the dope?
Every photo I load into photoshop looks different than when it is open in any other application. Usually purpler and worse.
This makes me worry that any editing I do in photoshop will not be accurate because I am not seeing how the finished product will look when viewed in other applications.
I am guessing PS isn’t broken so either I have a setting awry or my monitor needs to be calibrated properly.
So what I should I do (properly) to make photos look in photoshop like they do elsewhere? I’ve played about with the colour profiles in PS and the only one that (understandably) looks right is the ‘Monitor Color’ profile. All others look too purple.
Here’s a screenclip to illustrate.
The image on the left is loaded in PS. the image on the right is placed alongside it (loaded in a border-free image application I wrote)
The RGB colorspace consists of 24 bits of unique values which is about 16 million different color values per pixel. But depending on the deivce, whether it’s a capture device like a camera or scanner, or a printer or display, it’s not optimal to distrubute those 16 million values evenly across the colorspace. In other words, a scanner may be more sensitive in a particular color range than another, say more sensitive to reds than yellows, so if you use more bits to capture the reds and less to capture the yellows, you can concieveably capture a more accurate image.
So the purpose of a color profile is to allow each device to remap the colorspace in a more optimal way. When you view, or print the image with a different device, you remap the colorspace again to one more optimal to that device.
So the you describe problem occurs when you view an image using a different profile than what was used to capture it. Normally, the profile gets correctly applied automatically unless the metadata that stores the profile is missing.
Since your second screenshot looks fine, it appears that the wrong profile is being applied to the image when you open them in Photoshop.
Go to the color settings dialog under the edit menu and select “Preverve embedded profile” under the color management policies. You should also change your working RGB profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 as that’s more of the “default” profile for RGB images.
I suspect that you will find some odd setting in the Color Settings dialog box. That’s what controls Photoshop’s color management behavior when you open images.
I’ve had this happen, and the problem wasn’t the picture itself, it was the display settings of the proof setup being wonky. Now, the first thing I do when I open a file is:
View > Proof Setup > Monitor RGB
Which makes the picture look exactly how it will when it gets saved, instead of some simulated CMYK/RGB/whatnot environment. Try that and let me know if it’s fixed, if not, I haven’t a clue.
But I kind of want to know why there’s colour management in the first place. For all I know what looks right on my monitor might not look right on everyone’s, and that might be why documents are colour managed.
Or things that look right on my monitor might not look right printed out.
So, wait, did you have proofing set to “on”? If you go to your View menu, is there a checkbox next to “Proof”? Turn it off and you should be fine. Proofing is used to simulate what your photo will look like on other devices. It’s usually used to simulate the gamuts of say, a certain type of paper or something.
Exactly. Both, though physical printouts matter more since few non-graphical people bother to calibrate their monitors. Stuff you put online is subject to their systems’ mercy.
Hmm…then I’m not sure why you’re getting different colors. My only guess is that something in Edit > Color Settings was changed around. I have mine set to “North America General Purpose.” Make sure your working RGB space is set to sRGB IEC61966-2.1. and you should be okay.
(Although I have recently reset all my PS settings)
So, my monitor’s been reset. My PS has been reset. And still colours only look right if I set an image to the option that corresponds to my monitor (either in proofing or in colour settings)
Thanks for the help so far guys. I can live with using monitor rgb or monitor color to view my images. But if I am to learn how to be proficient with photoshop I should really be doing things as right as possible.
Weird. Any chance you can upload the original photo? For some reason, I seem to recall there being some weirdness with the color management in Photoshop 5.0 (which is what you appear to be using), but I can’t remember what the issues were.
Well since you asked for it, here is the original photo I’ve been using for an example…
But this problem occurs with everything I load in PS. Even screen captures.
I’m using CS4 (I assume that’s just a fancier name for 5.0)
Here is a screenshot I linked to earlier which shows an obvious difference between the file as viewed in a non-colour-managed app and PS…
edit: Just in case my colour-blindness has anything to do with this: To you (whoever’s reading this thread) which pic in the above link looks most ‘normal’? To my eyes it’s the one on the right.
No, it’s not your color-blindness. The pic on the left looks like it’s from another planet.
CS4 is Photoshop is Photoshop 11.0. I don’t know why your defaults are set to Photoshop 5.0 specs, but I don’t think that should cause a problem. The settings are the same as on my computer (except for the CMYK mode, which shouldn’t cause a problem as the image is RGB.)
I’ve opened it up in Photoshop CS3 and it looks perfectly normal on my computer.
See this thread here for some help. If you search for “magenta cast photoshop” you’ll find a few hits on people having the same problem as you. It looks to me like it’s an Adobe Gamma issue.
