photoshop frustrations

I have noticed that my work in photoshop will completely change when I convert an image from raw to jpeg. I do not understand why this is happening and I am providing a screen shot and converted jpeg to show everyone how big of a change is occurring. I tried merging layers and flattening the image first with no change in the end results. It has really been driving me nuts so please, if you know what is going on shoot me some pointers. The only thing that is hidden here in photoshop is an alpha channel which i used for sharpening.

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IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/70374000@N08/8​527771434/

Only thing I can possibly even think of is having an ICC profile selected in photoshop which is throwing off the colors. Make sure you are using one of the standard ICC profiles for your monitor.

Three related questions. What colour space are you using for editing? What colour space are you saving your JPEG image in? What application are you using to look at the JPEG and is it colour managed?

Also judging by your screen shot you are not having this issue when you convert from RAW but when you convert from a 16 bit .PSD file to an 8 Bit JPEG file. So what happens if you do a save as JPEG direct from ACR (making sure you choose to save it as sRGB colour space)? I know you won't have all the Photoshop editing, but it would help in trying to find the problem. Posting the image with EXIF intact may also help in seeing what you have done.

Alan

Oh snap I figured it out, good call ratjack you were thinking on the right track. Turns out my settings were on desaturate by 20% in CS5, I wonder how long I have been screwing up my images?! Looks like I need to go back and desaturate a ton of my images by 20% LOL!! Poor bird was getting COOKED hahahaha

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Oh and thanks bigAL, I am not using a calibration device if that is what you meant, although I may need to look into something in the future.

Well you do not "need" to use a colour measuring device to calibrate your screen, but it certainly helps. Some applications are colour managed, such as Photoshop and most other serious image editing software. This means that it can read the colour space information that may be embedded in an image file. Other applications are not managed and do not try to read and use that information. All of the different colour spaces (sRGB, AdobeRGB, ProPhotoRGB or MelissaRGB which are the common ones that may be found when working with Adobe products) use the same set of numbers to define the colour that you see, the problem is that the actual number used translates to a slightly (or possibly very) different colour depending on the colour space used. Effectively you can get a wider range of colours in some spaces than others, but those colours will be "further apart".

If you use a colour space other than the standard sRGB, then any non colour managed application will ignore the added data that tells it how to deal with the colours and display them as if they were sRGB. You may also fall into a problem if you save an image in a different colour space than sRGB and do not actually embed the colour space information into the file, as then even colour managed programs will not know how to treat the colours and will use the default colour space that the program is set to use.

Alan