Photos appear washed-out (desaturated) in PSCS2

wouldn’t the image appear skewed in BOTH programs if it were my monitor

1) it’s not your monitor, it’s your monitor profile.

2) It’s likely that the only software you have that does colour management is Photoshop, hence the difference.

Hugh,

Native Windows XP color management is rather rudimentary. Vista is supposed to have better builtin color management capabilities and Microsoft did release a color managemment app to extend XP but I haven’t used either so I can’t comment on them. Windows color management is based on the premise that applications and users shouldn’t have to know about color management. Just use untagged images and let the OS and the hardware do the work. And, that works fine if all you want is sRGB and your hardware is reasonably close to sRGB as well. But, for critical color work and for wider color spaces, you need more than that. And, that has to be handled by the individual application. Non-color managed applications don’t do anything with respect to the monitor profile or embedded profiles. Color management aware applications may convert embedded profiles but may assume the generic sRGB for the monitor and ignore any supplied monitor profile — it will vary by specific application. Fully Color Managed applications, such as Photoshop, use the embedded profiles and the monitor profile assuming you have appropriate color management settings. If you have two Adobe color managed applications and you see the same image appearing differently in each, you most likely have different color management settings in each — you may have even turned off color management in one.

Let’s start with the OS. When you calibrate your monitor and create a profile for it, two things must happen.

First, the software you used to calibrate the monitor should have a loader program that is placed in your startup folder. For Adobe Gamma, this is "adobe gamma loader.exe". This loads the profile and updates the contents of the graphics card LUT (look up table).

Second, the calibrated profile must be associated with the monitor in the OS and made the default profile. If it isn’t, PS won’t know to use it. Check your XP display properties to verify the default profile (look in the display properties dialog under settings, advanced, and check the color management tab). Associating the calibrated profile with the monitor does not load the video card LUT.

These two things seem to be independant in XP. I recently noticed a slight color shift and tracked it down to the default profile association being missing. The profile was being loaded and I could see the monitor colors change when the loader executed and the LUT was updated, but somehow the default association got deleted and PS was using the standard sRGB profile for the monitor in lieu of the calibrated one. Adding the association back fixed the problem.

Now let’s look at Photoshop CS2. First go to the View menu and make sure "proof colors" is not checked. You don’t want to confuse things by having that turned on.

Your default RGB working space is sRGB and your color management policy is to preserve embedded profiles. That’s fine. (If you have an image with an embedded Adobe RGB profile, it will look fine in PS but will appear washed out in non-color managed application — but not color shifted like yours is). It sounds like your issue is being caused by the monitor profile. To verify this, temporarily change the default RGB color space in CS2 to "Monitor RGB" — do this before you open the image. This will effectively bypass the monitor profile for display purposes and pass the color values to the display unaltered. If this make the problem go away, you definitely have a bad monitor profile and you need to recalibrate. By the way, the Monitor RGB line will show the current profile associated with the monitor — it should match the name you gave your calibrated profile when you saved it. You don’t normally want to use Monitor RGB as the working space so set it back to what you had.

Try this and let us know what happened.

"First, the software you used to calibrate the monitor should have a loader program that is placed in your startup folder."

I’ve never used anything to manually calibrate my monitor, is this something that is done automatically in PS with Adobe Gamma…how do I check this? I always thought you needed a hardware device to calibrate a monitor.

I always thought you needed a hardware device to calibrate a monitor. Ideally, you do, but you can do a visual calibration with Adobe Gamma. (But you still need to DO it)

Hugh,

I’d recommend reading this article by Ian Lyons. It gives a good overview of color management and Photoshop CS2 settings and includes a step through for how to use Adobe Gamma.
http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps9_colour/ps9_1.htm

A hardware calibration device is superior to a visual calibration tool such as Adobe Gamma. I use a hardware calibration device and feel it’s well worth the cost. But, regardless of which you use, you need to calibrate your monitor and do it on a regular basis — monitor characteristics change over time. Calibration is not automatic, you have to execute the calibration program that came with the device or execute the Adobe Gamma control panel applet, whichever you are using, to start the process.

Well, the monitor calibration solved the problem. I never knew to use Adobe Gamma…I thought it was an automatic profiling tool that was built into PSCS2. As soon as I calibrated my monitor in Gamma the change was immediatly apparent…here is the AFTER results.

< http://www.harleypeople.org/ubb/uploads/00000001/photoshop5. JPG>

It is still a bit off, but MUCH BETTER than before…and definitely manageable. It will be even better once my Monaco Optix XR arrives!!

Thanks again for all your advice and guidance.

Hugh