Have you made any changes like a new monitor or video card? If you’ve gotten a new monitor, run Adobe Gamma for monitor calibration. If you’ve gotten a new card, check to see if you have any new settings on, like video acceleration.
If neither of these apply, try the easiest thing first – delete the Elements Preference folder. That’s always a simple thing to do when something that used to be OK now isn’t for some strange reason. All that will happen is that you’ll lose a couple of settings you might have made, and those can be redone pretty fast.
With Elements closed, click on the start up icon and then make a quick grab for the (Win) Control, Alt, and Shift keys (Mac) Command, Option, and Shift. Hold all three down until you get a screen asking if you want to delete the Settings. Say Yes.
If none of these suggestions are worth the time it took to type them, repost and give us some system information – platform and OS. Good luck!
Thanks for your response, Beth. I have not made any recent changes that would affect the video display. I followed your instructions and deleted the preferences file, but no joy. The images still appear very dark and over-saturated. This problem has appeared just within the past week, and I can’t think of any changes to my system (Windows XP Professional) that would have produced it. I did notice that stuff gets downloaded from Adobe every so often when the program starts. It did this very recently. Any chance that something downloaded from Adobe has changed things? I am contemplating uninstalling and reinstalling the program, but I would prefer to avoid this if possible. (I’m not sure that would solve the problem either, but I suspect that it would.)
Thanks again,
Mike Costa
Did you try recalibrating the monitor? This isn’t my strong point, but it’s possible something might have effected your settings. I hear tell that happens occasionally, even though I’ve never experienced it myself. And, since Elements is probably the only color managed app you’ve got loaded, it would also account for why it’s the only one effected – as well as explain why the images you edited previously are still printing out OK.
You might also want to go to Edit>Preferences>Adobe Online and set the frequency to Never, which is what most of us regulars on the forum have done. I can’t think of a single update Adobe has generated in almost two years. If it ever happens it’ll be front page news on the forum, so you can download it manually! 🙂
Well, I am about to give up. I uninstalled and reinstalled the program, and the problem remains. (So, apparently, the problem was not caused by updates downloaded recently from Adobe.) I then tried recalibrating the monitor using Adobe Gamma. However, this did seem to affect the image properties in all Windows programs, not just Elements. That won’t do, since the other programs all display the images correctly and they print as displayed. Rather than further mess with my system, I guess I will start using another photo editing program.
Thanks for all the suggestions.
Mike Costa
You may want to check your colour settings (ctrl+shft+K)
Change them to another setting (full from none, or none from full), restart elements.
See how that goes
Paul
Never say never, I guess. I found a tab for Color Management in the advanced section of the display settings for Windows. This was set to a color profile. I may have created this color profile at some time; I don’t remember whether I did or not. Its name indicated it was for my model monitor. In any case I changed the setting for the Color Management profile to "none" and clicked "apply." This did not change the appearance of anything in Windows, but when I reopened Elements, lo and behold, the images had returned to displaying properly. It appears that Beth’s inference that it was related to the color profile settings was correct. It is still a mystery to me why this problem suddenly occurred, since I’m sure that I hadn’t changed anything in that Color Management tab for at least the past year. I had even forgotten that there was a Color Management tab in the Display Settings. Anyway, I am a happy camper again, and I have learned something (albeit, not much) about how color management works in the process. Thanks especially to Beth and to all who made suggestions.
Mike Costa
