For some unknown reason, beginning at some point in the recent past, when I open photos in Photoshop, they take on a yellow cast. The background color is automatically set to this light yellow color instead of pure white, and it gives photos a yellow cast (i.e. parts of a photo that should be white are yellow instead). It wasn’t always this way… I don’t know what I did to cause this.
Also, when I open a photo, I get an “embedded profile mismatch” message saying that the embedded color profile does not match the working profile. So I Googled “photoshop working space” and found this article that talks about color profiles, so I adjusted it under edit > color settings, and I still have the problem with this message popping up. Again, this NEVER was a problem before. I would just open a photo and it would open without any message or yellow hue.
I’m no expert, though I do use Photoshop a lot. When I get stuff from the printer that has been designed on a Mac, I often get this problem. Sounds like your camera might be imposing a color profile on the JPGs it takes. Maybe check your camera manual? You may be able to reset it to something neutral. Or it might just be a quirk of that particular camera.
The two things I do are: change my color profile to the default out-of-the-box Photoshop one, and then “convert document’s colors to…” when opening it. In other words, I discard the mismatched profile in favor of the default one. Seems to work for me.
Finally, do you default to RGB rather than CMYK? If you have some setting that changes from one to the other, this can also cause color disparities.
I hate to offer the nuclear response, but you could try to reinstall photoshop. I understand that nothing has changed since it worked fine and now (no new software, hardware, etc). You may have inadvertently deleted some file or changed some setting that is now giving you this problem.
Uninstall first and then reinstall. (if you are comfortable with this kind of operations, that is, annoying is better than not working at all)
I wouldn’t reinstall the app. Just toss the preferences, that will set everything back to zero. My recollection is you can start Photoshop holding the Shift key, and that will do the trick. If this doesn’t work, tell me what platform you’re using, and I’ll post the location of the Photoshop prefs file so you can toss it (or back it up) by hand.
It seems to do it with photos of many different cameras. I’ve had quite a few different cameras, and it does it with all these photos, plus photos from other people’s cameras.
Now if I could only find that darned disk!!
I’m using Windows XP, and Photoshop 7 (I know, it’s ancient, but beggars can’t be choosers!)
Maybe it’s a color profile or working gamut problem. If you’ve selected a working color profile that’s very different from the right one for the monitor you’re using, Photoshop may be compensating incorrectly for color correction.
Go To Edit -> Coloer Settings and check the “Working Spaces”. If you have one of these that matches the model of your computer monitor, select that one. If not, (and you probably don’t), sRGB is a good baseline. You might also see if different options under “Color Management Policies” have a positive effect on your problem.
Nah, you never want your working space to be a monitor profiles. Monitor profiles are perceptually non-uniform and are not usually well gray-balanced across the range. The monitor profile is made to smooth out the physical inconsistencies that physical objects have. Always use a synthetic working space like sRGB, or better yet, AdobeRGB.
Alright, there are a couple of things here that are wrong that jump out at me. First, according to the screen grabs of the mismatch dialogs, you’re incoming docs are tagged with the sRGB profile and presumably actually in that color space. But you’re choosing to ‘discard’ that color information in either case meaning that it’s going to try to display the photo in the default working space without performing the necessary corrections. As sRGB is a smaller color space than either AdobeRGB or your monitor profile, your whites are likely to come out less than full scale, in this case a dingy yellow. It’s best to set the working space to AdobeRGB (but your monitor profile will work in a pinch) and choose either of the other two options in that dialog. ‘Discard’ is really the only wrong option of the three.
Where <username> is whatever your account name is on XP, and <BootDriveLetter> is undoubtedly “c:”. You will need to turn on “show hidden files and folders” in Explorer (menus: “Tools->Folder Options…”, ‘View’ tab, choose “show hidden files and folders” checkbox, hit OK)
Take the file “Adobe Photoshop <some version> Prefs.psp” and either rename it (if you want to be able to Undo this later), or delete it.
ETA: I also see in my install a file called “Color Settings.csf”, which may also store preferences for color. You may want to save that off somewhere, or rename it, or whatever so Photoshop can’t find it. This may only be a CS3 thing, but save the file so you can put it back in that folder if this is a Bad thing to delete.
