Do your images look different inside & outside Photoshop

[PFlor]

I just noticed that my images when opened in Photoshop look more vivid compared to opening it in another program such as ACDSee, where the image's colors are more desaturated. Is this normal? All images are using the sRGB color space and I already have my monitor calibrated using Adobe Gamma.

[Roger_Cavanagh]

My guess is that you might have Adobe RGB as your working space in Photoshop, and that colour settings need checking.

sRGB images viewed in Adobe RGB will look over-saturated.

ACDSee is not a colour-managed application, but you are doing the correct thing by using sRGB to minimise the impact on appearance.

Regards,

[PFlor]

Roger_Cavanagh wrote:
My guess is that you might have Adobe RGB as your working space in Photoshop, and that colour settings need checking.

sRGB images viewed in Adobe RGB will look over-saturated.

ACDSee is not a colour-managed application, but you are doing the correct thing by using sRGB to minimise the impact on appearance.

Regards,

Nope. My working space is Web Graphics Default (sRGB) and the images also have sRGB profile embedded. My concern here is when preparing for online prints, which application will closely resembles the final output - Photoshop or some application outside of it.

[Leighow]

I am not as adventurous as you appear to be.

But FYI, I only print out of photoshop. Here, following the advice of Roger and others (see posts related to color management), I always convert my SRGB profile to Epson 880 before printing.

Subsequent prints are as close to the screen image as I require. In a word -- excellent. Indeed, one recent shot of tulips taken with the G2 and printed on the Epson and Epson 4 in by 6 photo paper has made me a finalist in an Ottawa area tulipfest photo contest. (Winners will be announced today!)


HOWIE

[slejhamer]

When you calibrated your monitor using Adobe Gamma, did you use the individual RGB sliders or the single gray slider? If only the gray, try doing the former.

Also, if you turn color management off (which should set the PS working space to the monitor profile, I think) do the images look the same in and out of PS? They should...

[PFlor]

slejhamer wrote:
When you calibrated your monitor using Adobe Gamma, did you use the individual RGB sliders or the single gray slider?

Yes. Individual sliders were used.


Also, if you turn color management off (which should set the PS working space to the monitor profile, I think) do the images look the same in and out of PS? They should...

Yes also. The images look the same inside and outside photoshop when color management is turned off. So can I assume this is normal then and that the images viewed in Photoshop are how they should really look?

[slejhamer]

PFlor wrote:
So can I assume this is normal then and that the images viewed in Photoshop are how they should really look?

Hard to say without knowing how far off the colors are, but that's probably correct. I should note that when I calibrated my monitor with a Spyder and Photocal it made a nice improvement over what I had with Adobe Gamma, and I highly recommend those products.

As I understand it, an app that is not ICC compliant (ACDSee, Internet Explorer, etc.) will ignore an image file's profile, and will instead display the image as if it were in your calibrated monitor space. (Actually I'm not sure it's the app that's doing this, but rather your system. Either way, the result is the same.)

But if the file is tagged with sRGB (or any other) profile, it may display differently. You haven't calibrated your monitor to sRGB (and I don't know how you can, or if you'd want to); instead you have calibrated it to something else (in this case, your own vision.)

A test you can run to verify this is to open your image file in PS and convert it to the monitor profile, save it with the new profile (as a copy, of course) and then open it in ACDSee. It should now look reasonably close to what you saw in PS. Alternatively, in PS you can soft-proof to your monitor space to get an approximation of how it will look in a non-compliant app. As an alternative to the alternative, you can soft-proof to Windows RGB to see how Windows itself might display the same image without monitor compensation.

Likewise, if you have access to your printlab's printer and media profile, you should convert to that space before sending the image to the lab (similar to what Howie has done by converting to his Epson printer profile.) For an online service like Ofoto I have used sRGB in the past with decent results, but now for my online prints I use a dummy profile that I made with Trinitron primaries. I find it to be a slight improvement over sRGB (warmer reds.)

One other thing you can try is to send a test image to the lab and see if it is closer to what you see in PS or what you see elsewhere, and make adjustments accordingly. Success with this method requires the lab to be reasonably consistent with their output.

Here are some additional discussions that may help:

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=004KkU
(especially Noshir's 1/10/03 post)

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003oJw

Regards,
Mitch

(P.S. Note to everyone: if I am wrong with any of the above, please correct me!)

[CyberDyneSystems]

FIY,
Despite the fact that I'm sure all that people have posted here is accurate,...

ACDsee and Photoshop colors never match under any circumstances!

I do not know the reason. But It sound like slejhammer is probably on the right track,. as I find ACDSee and IE to match up much closer,.. (maybe identical?)

But I can assure you,. I have been using ACDSee since version 2 (mid 90's) and Photoshop since Version 4, On dozens of different PCs.

Never under any circumstances has the color been the same between the two apps. ACDsee just doesn't display the color as well. (accurately)

When you consider that ACDsee's original intended use was as file management utility for graphics,. the very slight wash out of color can hardly be big problem.

[PFlor]

slejhamer,
Thanks for the links. That helped a lot.

Cyber,
Just to clarify, we're not just talking about Photoshop and ACDSee. The images look the same (slightly desaturated compared to PS) with any other application that can view images with no built in color management - IE, Netscape, Fireworks, etc.. But after reading slejhamer's links I'm led to believe that this is normal.