Julian: You appear to want things the way you ‘expect’ them to be rather than what they are.
That is what soft-proofing is for, if you want to work in sRGB then set your RGB in color management to that and work in that space. Pretty simple. You can also save different color settings and load them at will.
Knock your head on a wall.
ID Awe – no you have not read what I have written. I do work in sRGB but what I produce is quite different from when I save to web i.e. what other people are seeing. That’s entirely my problem.
As to knocking head on a wall, I want to efficiently produce images for the web that I can also print later accurately. Is that so outrageous?
Olaf – if I display one of my images in a browser, I am seeing it as close as possible on my monitor to how others will see it i.e. non-color managed. The PS soft-proof that replicates that appearance on my computer is "Monitor". I work in sRGB so soft-proofing to sRGB doesn’t show anything different.
Softproof to "sRGB" = softproof to "Windows" = what I see when I edit in Photoshop.
But what I see in a browser or Windows P&F viewer is something different, in my case very different. Which is my problem.
As I understand it, viewing a non-cm-managed image on a CALIBRATED monitor will be a closer approximation to what other people see viewing on their UNCALIBRATED monitors than if I leave my monitor uncalibrated. For the reason that uncalibrated monitors will be all over the place, but a calibrated one is likely to be somewhere in the middle of the range. If my monitor was uncalibrated then it could well be at one extreme or another of an infinite variety of wrong renderings. As a simple one-dimensional example, if I use a calibrated display my gamma will be "correct", let’s say 2.0 or 2.2. Other people will view on monitors with gamma 1.8. 2.5 etc, but 2.2 or 2.0 will be a decent best guess. If I was uncalibrated, my gamma could well be 3 so I would not be seeing anything like what other people are seeing. Hence my BEST approximation if I am a web designer is to view an image in a non-cm-application on a calibrated screen.
To repeat for one last time, when I edit in sRGB, what I produce is noticeably different from what other people are seeing, i.e. what I see when I preview my image in a non-cm browser etc. This is supported by the observation of my images on other people’s monitors where the sky is the same horrible colour that I see on my machine in a browser. Which is not what I see when I edit in PS. The only way I can emulate in PS what shows in a browser (to me and to other people) is to soft-proof to MONITOR.
This is my problem, clearly I don’t understand something. The fact that much of the info in this thread and in similar threads is contradictory or doesn’t address what I have written indicates that I am not alone. I would like to understand it but obviously despite a couple of degrees and a working life in complex systems, I am too stupid to do so.
calibrate the monitor! read the link i supplied.
Dave – this is extremely frustrating. As I have written several times, both my monitors are calibrated and by other tests and comparisons are well calibrated without any problem or faulty profiles. What I see in a calibrated environment matches very well to what I print with a profiled printer and what is printed by a colour managed lab.
I have read the article before, and checked through it again when you posted it, it does NOT address what I am asking.
What I see in a calibrated environment matches very well to what I print with a profiled printer and what is printed by a colour managed lab.
that’s all you can control julian. you can’t control other people’s monitors. unless ALL your devices are WAY off you shouldn’t be that far off from "normal" uncalibrated.
Julian Robinson wrote:
To repeat for one last time, when I edit in sRGB, what I produce is noticeably different from what other people are seeing, i. e. what I see when I preview my image in a non-cm browser etc. […] The only way I can emulate in PS what shows in a browser (to me and to other people) is to soft-proof to MONITOR.
Yes, sure. And I explained why it is this way. I am not going to repeat it again.
— Olaf
Julian, just replying to let you know you’re not alone with the issue;
They should all look the same on my screen because they are all interpreting the image as sRGB. But they don’t any more. They used to, but from a couple of weeks ago they don’t.
I’ve been very happy with my sRGB workflow (ACR+PSCS3, WinXP Pro SP2) on my NEC2070NX (calibrated to 2.2/6500K with Spyder2) since I have been getting very consistent results (color wise) when editing images for web use (not with SFW though, just saving jpgs without embedding the srgb profile). Without any need for explicit soft proofing in PS the colors have always been almost exactly the same when viewing with non-cm-aware applications like Firefox2 (and I’m not claiming that this is how it is SUPPOSED to work but it’s been very handy anyway). A couple of weeks ago I noticed that the images going through the exact same work flow are showing increased saturation, especially with red/yellow tones, when viewed with e.g. Firefox2. I’ve gone through all the fixes recommended in this thread and on www.gballard.net (total recalibration from scratch after removing all Spyder stuff etc) with no luck in getting the results to show like they used to 🙁 ..
Well Miko there’s a bunch of people here who claim to understand what happens, but a) they can’t explain it, b)some don’t even read and understand the problem I/we and others have, and c) there is some contradiction between them. So I don’t know the solution either! Thanks for writing but I don’t know how to resolve this for us.
Basically, us Windows/IE users are screwed until Internet Explorer becomes color-management aware. I have a wide-gamut monitor and see this shift all the time. There’s no way to fix it. (Mac users here will chime in with "The fix is to get a Mac!)
The problem is that IE ignores any color space tags on an image. It simply passes the RGB values to the display adapter. If you’ve profiled your display that does not really matter, because it’s unlikely your display’s color space matches sRGB. As an example, saving an image with sRGB in Photoshop and then displaying it on a wide-gamut monitor will show the colors as looking garish, because any saturated color in sRGB will have much more saturation if the same color values are presented in the larger color space of your calibrated monitor. You can see this by pasting an image copied from the web into Photoshop, then assign the sRGB profile to it. Next, select View/Proof Setup and select Monitor RGB. To see the shift select Custom from the Proof Setup menu and toggle the "Preserve Color Numbers" box.
If you have a more sophisticated monitor and/or profiling package, you can adjust the monitor to match a target display and set the target display as the sRGB color space. If you do this, the appearance of the sRGB images will no longer shift in the browser, but that will only be for you and any other users who do this. The rest of us will still see a color shift. You will also lose the ability to see colors outside the sRGB space while that setting is active.
Sad, but that is the nature of Microsoft’s current implementation. All I can say is complain to the IE development team and ask them to fix the issue.
Christopher,
You seem to have a very good grasp of what’s going on. This is only going to get more widespread as time goes by. For better or worse, sRGB is the defacto color space of the internet and that’s what most images are, tagged or not. The IE team certainly knows about color management and profiles as IE for Mac has been able to recognize profiles for several years. Why they figured Windows users wouldn’t need this also is beyond me but it certainly can’t be that hard for them to integrate. For now, PC users are pretty much limited to Safari for profile awareness, unless there’s something else new that does it too. The more people that ask for the needed feature the more likely it will come. The first step, of course, is recognizing both the problem and the proper solution, which you’ve done quite well.
For all who wish to comment to Microsoft on this issue, a URL for free support online is <
https://support.microsoft.com/contactus2/emailcontact.aspx?s cid=sw;en;1214&ws=support>
What’s interesting about this issue is just how broken the XP internals are for color management. If one copies an image from a web page to the clipboard (Right-click, then copy in IE) and then pastes this into Photoshop, the image comes in without any color management tags. So the tags are lost in the Windows Clipboard. However, if one right-clicks on the image in the browser and saves it as a file, then opens it in Photoshop, the profile of the image comes through.
Sorta like when you do a screen shot on a Mac (where you would expect color stuff to be worked out) and the screen shot gets tagged with something Apple calls Generic RGB, when, in fact, it should be tagged with the monitor profile. Just to let you all know that even Apple, who helped invent this digital color management still gets it wrong some of the time. Hell, they’re still telling people to calibrate to 1.8.
So, is there nothing that can be done about it currently? I am having the same issue, except mine is a little more problematic: my image files that are going to the lab and being printed match the way they look in Internet Explorer instead of Photoshop.
Any ideas what that could be? Or should I start a new thread so I don’t hijack this one?
Thanks,
Travis
Travis,
You should probably start a new thread with all the particulars. You problem sounds like it’s not too difficult to figure out.
OK, I’ll keep an eye on this one though because I think they may be one and the same.
Travis
