If you turn off colour management, your monitor profile is used as your working space. If you’re doing web work, you would probably want to use sRGB as your working space, because it most closely approximates what people are going to see in their web browsers. As long as your system is using that properly calibrated monitor profile, photoshop will show you a proper-looking sRGB image. If you make your working space = your monitor profile, you will only ever see an image the way it would look on your specific monitor, so basically what anyone else sees will be different, because they’re not all using your monitor (but they are most likely displaying their images in sRGB).
Thanks Gary, Peter!
PeterK, Your recommendation makes good sense to me, but raises one question. Why are most web users likely to be using sRGB? Is it a standard in some browsers?
Cheers!
It is a color standard hardwired into quite a few RGB devices including monitors, printers and digital cameras. It was developed by HP, IBM and microsoft among others as a color reference standard. It’s a ballpark estimation to the narrow RGB space of the devices mentioned. It’s based on a 2.2 gamma correction curve and D65 white point.
Jim,
Why are most web users likely to be using sRGB? <<
They’re not, BUT most monitors roughly equate to sRGB.
MOST web users are using uncalibrated and incredibly badly adjusted monitors!
Most web browsers do not support any kind of colour management (none do under Windows). There is no point in tagging files for use on the web as 99% of users will see no difference and doing so inflates file size increasing d/load times.
Any thoughts of consistent colour on the web is doomed to failure for a long time yet……
Ah, thanks Tim – good to know. That should do it then.
Thanks Len,
This is great! Learning at a rapid rate here 🙂
Judging by my own previous ignorance and such, i suppose the percentage of web professionals with properly calibrated equipment is not so high either.
It would seem the easiest thing for webpage designers to include a simple little 10 step grayramp off in the corner somewhere and put a note indicating how it should look.
dpreview does this for their digital camera sample gallery among other sites who rely on visual accuracy. It’s like the offset press equivalent to registration bars. Then there would be no visitors, relying on a visual of a product on the site, claiming unexpected results.
Good idea Tim, i put a 4 step version on my old fine art photo site in 1996. 🙂 Have hardly updated that site since 🙁
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Jim,
Just curious… is OptiCAL in your Startup folder? I am under the impression that when you build a monitor profile with OptiCAL, you should have an OptiCAL shortcut in your Startup folder so that OptiCAL loads its monitor profile when you boot.
John
Hi John,
Yes, OptiCal always runs at startup (puts up a logo/dialog for a couple seconds), but is not in the startup group. Windows XP Pro must use another method to start it.
Thanks, Jim!
By any chance are you using dual monitors with OptiCAL? I ask because I have not been able to get OptiCAL to work on my dual monitor system — XP Home, Matrox G450 video card. Best I can do is use PreCal to set the monitor, then use Adobe Gamma to make a profile with no change to what it sees when it first opens to make the profile. This isn’t a great solution, but it’s working.
John
Not yet, John. Hoping to setup dual monitors soon, but the extra monitor will only be for tool palettes (mostly for Adobe Atmosphere), so no calibration needed.
I’m on XP Pro, with ATI Radeon 9600 Pro.
Jim,
I agree, no need to calibrate and profile the second monitor. However, OptiCAL won’t work for either monitor on a dual monitor setup. It has something to do with how Windows handles color management.
ColorVision told me on the phone that they will release a dual monitor support upgrade to OptiCAL sometime this Spring. We’ll see.
John
Ouch!
Thanks for the heads-up John!
