Color Managed VS non-Color Managed

Hi guys and gals,

Recently this topic has become hot again on POTN. I have tried to read as many thread related to CM as possible, including the link in Rene's sig, but remain just as confused if not more (I must admit I'm not the smartest in my class).

So to approach this CM thingy, I thought I should start from higher level, slowly moving down to the details to help me understand. Let me begin with a simple question....

In the current computer world, we have CM applications as well as non-CM applications. A photo's colors is "likely" to render differently between the two, as expected. The question is, is my effort wasted when i spend all the money and time to get nice monitor, calibrator, Photoshop to achieve the most accurate colors of my photo but my friends and family view it on a non-CM application such as Internet Explorer? If the answer is no, please help correct my understanding.

Hopefully your help can reduce not only 1, but more than 1, confused soul as far as Color Management is concerned. More people undestand CM, more help will be available, more good karma spread around. I sincerely appreciate your help and patient in advance.

cfcRebel wrote in post #6578694
The question is, is my effort wasted when i spend all the money and time to get nice monitor, calibrator, Photoshop to achieve the most accurate colors of my photo but my friends and family view it on a non-CM application such as Internet Explorer? If the answer is no, please help correct my understanding.

Is your effort wasted? I dont' believe so, because if you ever want to print your photos, you can predict pretty well what the output is going to look like with softproofing.

For friends and family viewing your pictures if you remeber to always convert your final product into the sRGB color space everything should more or less look good to them.

I think most people pretty much leave their monitors at the factory settings, so while the brightness and contrast might not be ideal for the way you want your pictures to look, they will look good to them.

Just think of sRGB as the default color space for everthing you see on the web and what most systems are really set up for. Point and shoot cameras render in sRGB JPEG, and so just about all the content not posted by photogs is going to be sRGB

Jeff,

Good information. All these years I try to avoid unexpected color swift of my photos when being viewed in CM and non-CM apps. So, I stick with sRGB (camera >> ACR >> Photoshop CS >> Save for Web). At least until I understand how color profile, color workspace and the whole CM work together. However, yesterday after I did a Vista system update, it found a new profile for my Viewsonic monitor. So, i let it install that profile. Now Vista uses that Viewsonic profile as my display device profile, instead of sRGB(I suppose that's the right thing to do). Then i processed a photo in Photoshop and achieved the colors i intended, but after i posted online, it looks.....very different, in a negative way to put it lightly. So, that leads me to my question above.

Well...if you look at it this way...if you calibrate your monitor and are using the correct color profile for your computer...when you upload pictures to the web in sRGB, then you know that what you are seeing is the most accurate representation of the picture that you can come up with. so whether or not other people are seieng what you are seeing, really shouldn't matter, because you know how it should really look.

I would also double check to make sure that you are in sRGB and not AdobeRGB...

12mnkys wrote in post #6579331
Well...if you look at it this way...if you calibrate your monitor and are using the correct color profile for your computer...when you upload pictures to the web in sRGB, then you know that what you are seeing is the most accurate representation of the picture that you can come up with. so whether or not other people are seieng what you are seeing, really shouldn't matter, because you know how it should really look.

The problem is, when I see Vista says my display device is using the Viewsonic profile, and leave any non-CM device to sRGB, I thought i had it correct. And the colors do look good (I'm still wary on using the term "accurate") in Photoshop. However, when i uploaded the photo to web gallery(IE7), it looks "inaccurate". Is this expected? Did I miss something important in Vista System Color Management?

12mnkys wrote in post #6579331
I would also double check to make sure that you are in sRGB and not AdobeRGB...

I double checked my camera, ACR and Photoshop's Workspace Preference, all sRGB. No doubt there is something i still miss or misunderstand, or worse, both. It's just that I don't know how long an Oracle will come and enlight me what i miss and misunderstand.

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color management is definately handeled a bit differently in Vista than XP. My desktop is still XP and I just recently got a laptop that has Vista, so I'm not 100% on Vista's settings just yet, but I believe that in the color management menu in the devices tab you want the .icc profile for you monitor listed and "default" in brackets next to it. In the Advanced tab I think you're supposed to leave the settings alone, so under "system color" it should still have sRGB. Double check your Photoshop settings to make sure you have your "Working RGB" set to what you want. It should never be set to your monitors profile.

stillresonance wrote in post #6579510
color management is definately handeled a bit differently in Vista than XP. My desktop is still XP and I just recently got a laptop that has Vista, so I'm not 100% on Vista's settings just yet, but I believe that in the color management menu in the devices tab you want the .icc profile for you monitor listed and "default" in brackets next to it. In the Advanced tab I think you're supposed to leave the settings alone, so under "system color" it should still have sRGB. Double check your Photoshop settings to make sure you have your "Working RGB" set to what you want. It should never be set to your monitors profile.

Yep, Vista CM Devices tab says the Viewsonic Profile is set as default. AAMOF, it's the only profile list in the box. As for the Advanced tab, i did not touch anything there. So, we are all good there.

In Photoshop, my Working RGB shows "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" as I understand, that's what i should use atm.

Image plays a thousand word. Let me make a screenshot (like we are short of screenshots in CM related threads :lol that shows the color swift. Will be back.....

As you can see, the blue has changed quite a bit when viewed in IE7 compared to Photoshop. Although not indentical Vista's Windows Photo Gallery shows the blue closer to Photoshop's (does that mean the Windows Photo Gallery is a CM program? well, I'll leave it for another day). This screenshot was made when Vista Color Management Devices tab says my default display profile is the Viewsonic Profile.icc.

If I change the default display profile to sRGB, then the blue looks very close among Photoshop, IE7, and Windows Photo Gallery but I know I should not assign sRGB as my default display device profile.

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So my question is, is what shown in the screenshot above the way things are supposed to be as far as CM VS non-CM is concerned?

You know I think a lot of the problems we're running into has to do with color management in Vista. Instead of just going with the standard way of doing things Microsoft developed this "Windows Color System" (WCS) it was pretty straight forward in XP but now this WCS throws a new variable into things. Unfortunately I don't know enough about what they're doing to make sense of the extra settings that have been included in Vista's CM.

Take a look at these screen shots of the CM control panel. You'll notice that under WCS it has a device profile box with system default in it and then it has a box below it that gives different rendering intents for WCS. Under the profiles tab it seems to indicate the profile for ICC viewing and WCS were prepared using different illuminates as their base line ( when it comes to illuminates I'm really lost in CM)

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and

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One way to avoid banging you head against the wall is, just don't use IE, you'll sleep better at night

stillresonance wrote in post #6579746
You know I think a lot of the problems we're running into has to do with color management in Vista. Instead of just going with the standard way of doing things Microsoft developed this "Windows Color System" (WCS) it was pretty straight forward in XP but now this WCS throws a new variable into things.

Not another Color System, Bill!

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Yeah I've looked on Microsoft's website and the information they give about WCS is useless. Need someone who is an expert on Color and Vista to check in here.

In the meantime, I can use some clarification to get rid of my "Color Mgt Dummy" status. Is one of the purposes of Color Mgt and Profiling to ensure all my calibrated devices, as well as other people's calibrated devices, interpret the color in the same photo the same way?