CMYK for web?

For a while now I have resized images that I will use for uploading to the web a certain way, which is to size it in photoshop at 1236 pixels on the long side, and then take a screen shot of the image. I have tried "save as" with those dimensions & compared but the quality of screen shot is much better (especially in the eyes, they don't get pixelated). Anyways, it saves the screen shot as a PNG on my mac, but I never noticed until today that it converts it from an sRGB (how I had it in photoshop) to a CMYK color. I didn't know what that is so I researched it, and to my understanding CMYK is not for web, only for print, because it overly-saturates the images? On my screen when I open the sRGB and screenshot image the colors look the same. When I upload online I only notice the screen shot image to be a tiny bit more saturated, but I don't know if this is just my monitor? I know everyone's monitors are calibrated differently so we might not all see the same, but I just want to know how most of the people see it


Here on the left is an image saved in sRGB as a JPEG sized
at 1236pixels in height and 114DPI. (Don't mind the actual photo
& composition, it's a trashed image & I cropped it randomly to
just use as test)

I don't know about "better", there just seems to be a slight difference, I see it in the skin, but looking at either one "stand-alone", well, to me it just wouldn't matter!

That being said, I don't have a Mac and don't know about the CMYK issue. What if you convert the image to sRGB? I don't work with PNG files, though, I'm just taking stabs "in the dark"!

It's not just "the web," it's the rendering done by the web browser. Until recently, most web browsers didn't properly interpret any color space other than sRGB - they just gave it a wild guess, which usually was quite wrong. Differences in monitor calibration are also significant, though small in comparison. It's likely that if the CMYK image looks OK in your web browser, then you're using a web browser that properly handles CMYK images.

It's impossible to know how "most" people will see the image unless you also know what web browser, operating system, and monitor "most" people are using. It's reasonable to assume that "most" people are using a web browser that will properly display an image with sRGB color space. It's NOT reasonable to assume that "most" people are using a web browser that will properly display a CMYK image. Firefox? Safari? Internet Explorer? Opera, Lynx, who knows what browser your viewers are using.

Even with an updated web browser that's capable of displaying images in color spaces other than sRGB, some web-based applications (like the Dropbox web app, and sometimes even Facebook) won't properly handle images that were created with a color space other than sRGB.

Your right image has an RGB monitor profile attached. I'm unsure what your question is. Don't use CMYK for the web or photo printing, it's for commercial printing only.

CMYK is for printing only and the abbreviature stands for four ink colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black)). Monitors display images in 3 color space, RGB. Short answer - you shouldn't save as CMYK.

Just fun fact, PNG format is for screens only and doesn't support CMYK.

As was mentioned above, you still see your image in RGB, since a RGB profile is attached. For some people, your image will look like this:

IMAGE IS A REDIRECT OR MISSING! HTTP response: NOT FOUND | MIME changed to 'image/png'

Ok, I don't feel very smart now. When I opened the screenshot image and clicked "save as" it showed "working CMYK" next to the color section so I assumed it meant that's how it currently was. But after reading Tim's post I clicked on "more info" on the image, indeed, it does say RGB. Thanks everyone for helping though! I did learn new stuff, I didn't know each browser & online program interpreted the color spaces differently

Color can be tricky. Grab one of the books from my book thread, could help you a lot. Note the list is a bit old, check for newer versions of books before ordering anything.

Naraly wrote in post #16938751
Ok, I don't feel very smart now. When I opened the screenshot image and clicked "save as" it showed "working CMYK" next to the color section so I assumed it meant that's how it currently was. But after reading Tim's post I clicked on "more info" on the image, indeed, it does say RGB. Thanks everyone for helping though! I did learn new stuff, I didn't know each browser & online program interpreted the color spaces differently

One thing to be aware of -- there is a difference from something saying "RGB" and the actual color space used by generic viewers and generic Web browsers (and which "color aware" browsers/viewers can easily handle), which is "sRGB". When you see "RGB" (without the "s") then it typically refers to something internal/in your system, and maybe the Mac is using that internally, but is not "meant" for the "outside world".

How much of a difference that will make in what you actually put out and see is, well, it can vary, although I don't know the various "technical" details. Maybe someone "in the know" can fill in the blanks!

Any image that appears on a screen is in that monitor's color space. The space will be determined by the profile used by the OS or graphics card to configure the monitor and the monitor's physical characteristics. Therefore a screen capture will necessarily be in that monitor space (which will always be an RGB space - monitors don't do CMYK because they don't use ink.) The capture tool used by the OP very sensibly embedded the correct profile, the monitor profile. Unfortunately, an image with an embedded profile different from sRGB will require a color managed browser to be seen properly. MS's Snipping Tool embeds sRGB which is inaccurate but probably not horribly so.