Colour profiles within PS are off for one monitor only?

TW
Posted By
Tom_Waterhouse
Aug 21, 2008
Views
344
Replies
5
Status
Closed
Hi guys,

I’m having a very strange issue with colour management in Photoshop CS2 currently.

Photoshop seems to be calibrating all documents in a strange way on only *one* monitor. If I drag the file across to the other monitor the colour is completely different.

Of course it sounds like my monitors being off, however when dragging the file across monitors Photoshop slowly updates the colours for the next monitor. You can see it display the wrong colour at first, then correct it (hopefully that makes sense).

Another symptom of it is when I go to ‘save for web’. Here, the colours revert to what I believe are correct.

It’s worth noting that this has only started to happen since some Windows updates. One being an option update from Dell for my monitor – I can’t seem to find any information about it though!

My tester that I’ve been using is a plain white to black gradient. What I’m seeing is a lot of cyan in the middle of the gradient. I’ve saved off an example:

<http://2dforever.com/photoshop.png>

As you can see, all the greys are very green, but if you look at the gradient tool in the toolbar itself, the grey appears fine.

I’m unsure how I can adjust the colour profile from Photoshop for one monitor – am I missing something really obvious here?

Just to note: I’m on Win Xp SP2, Photoshop CS2, and I’ve cleared the preferences.

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C
Curvemeister
Aug 21, 2008
Since you only mention Photoshop as having a problem, this is almost certainly, as you suspect, a monitor profile config problem.

Color profiles for individual monitors are configured in Start>Settings>Control Panel>Display>Settings>(Advanced Button)>Color Management.

In Settings, click on the monitor whose profile you want to verify before clicking on the "Advanced…" button. I would start by adding and defaulting the profile for the monitor that is causing problems.

The Microsoft XP color control panel applet makes setup easier, though it is not really necessary. If the link below fails, google for keywords Microsoft XP color control panel applet.
< http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1e3 3dca0-7721-43ca-9174-7f8d429fbb9e&displaylang=en>
C
Curvemeister
Aug 21, 2008
Left out a piece of info:

I would start by adding and defaulting the _sRGB Color Space Profile_ for the monitor that is causing problems.
TW
Tom_Waterhouse
Aug 21, 2008
Hi, thanks for the quick reply.

I’m unsure if it is a colour profile problem though. It only occurs in Photoshop on one monitor. Using a black to white gradient in other applications (including others from the Adobe suite, such as Illustrator) produce what I see as a perfect black to white gradient, without these blue mid-tones that Photoshop is producing.

Just to reiterate, this problem is only happening on one monitor. If I drag the Photoshop document to the other monitor I can see Photoshop re-adjusting the colours as it goes across.
It appears that Photoshop is using different colour profiles on different monitors.

I’ll experiment with my colour profiles anyway, see what I can find out from that!

Thanks again.
TW
Tom_Waterhouse
Aug 21, 2008
Agh, I’m really sorry guys – turns out it was a basic user error.

After installing software updates for my monitor it appears my colour profile has been removed. I assumed that without a colour profile assigned it would be fine, but obviously not.

Thank you for pointing it out – and making me realise!

Tom
C
Curvemeister
Aug 21, 2008
Great, Tom. Glad you were able to fix the problem.

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