Settings question for PSCS2

Hello,

I hope someone can understand my issue. I can't give an example so I hope my explaination is enough.

When I am viewing images in the main photoshop window they are very pixelated almost to the point of looking cartoonish. Not the entire image, mainly in the shadows ar any area that is thrown out of focus due to a shallow DoF.

When I view the image in microsoft picture and fax viewer or an internet browser ( I used IE explorer as well as firefox) The image looks fine.

I am guessing that I unknowingly changed a setting somewhere and I have no idea what it could be. Has anyone seen anything like this or know what I am talking about?'

Thank you in advance for any help!

Sam

If you go into the preferences dialog, I think you can hold down ALT to change the cancel button to RESET. Should reset your options to default I'd imagine.

Perhaps it's your colour space. Edit > Colour Settings
Maybe it's something to do with AdobeRGB?? Same thing, hold ALT and click Reset.

Thank you RAitch, I tried that but it is the same. I started noticing the problem last night but I thought it was the images themselves. So tonight when I say it again I viewed the images on other programs without issue.

I have a feeling this is going to drive me insane tonight.

Would an ALT-PrtSc of the PS window and the other application side by side show the difference?
Maybe that will give us an understanding of the problem so we can see the difference in your images.

Could it be something with the Adobe Gamma thing (calibration for Adobe that other apps don't use)?

Ok, I just fixed it, but I don't ever remember having to adjust This setting in the years that I have used photoshop.

Under the "View" menu if I check "Proof Colors" and then select "Monitor RGB" from the "Proof Setup" dropdown menu it solves the problem. I never set this before? Is it normally this way by default?

Thank you very much for trying to help.

Hopefully if anyone else ever has this problem they find this thread...

After opening a new image, my Proof colour option is not selected. Under the Proof Setup menu, I have "Working CMYK" selected as my option.

Weird...

I have to select it each time I open a new image.... Odd.

The problem could be a bad monitor profile - the applications you mention as not having a problem with aren't colour managed.

David

How would I fix that if it were the problem?

[EDIT] I am only having the issue in photoshop.

Thanks for backing up what I thought in post 4 David.
Sam, did you ever run through Adobe Gamma? Play around with that, maybe you can deactivate it or erase the current profile or something.

I can't help out more if that's the cause. I don't use Adobe Gamma at all.