Color is inconsistencies between Photoshop and iTunes
Often when I work on cover art for my iTunes collection in Photoshop, after getting the colors looking just right while still in Photoshop, I'll copy the artwork into iTunes and I don't end up with the same results. What I see displayed in Photoshop and what I see displayed in iTunes don't match -- both colors and overall brightness and contrast tend to shift.
Here's a screenshot with the iTunes view of an album cover seen behind the Photoshop view of the same image:
In this example, you can see a that the slightly orangy red seen in Photoshop becomes distinctly brighter and more orange seen in iTunes. I'm sure the problem has something to do with color spaces and color profiles and whatnot, but I have no clue what to do to fix it.
I've tried turning Proof Colors on and off, and when Proof Colors are switched on I've tried Mac RGB, Windows RGB, Monitor RGB, and various settings from the custom menu like sRGB IEC61966-2.1, Apple RGB, ColorMatch RGB, Generic RGB, e-sRGB, CIE RGB, etc.
I've tried saving files as both TIFF and PNG, with and without embedding an sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile (the only profile that is ever offered) in the saved files.
All of these things produce changes, sometimes subtle, sometimes hideous, but I haven't found a combination or permutation which gives me what I really want... WYSIWYG.
I realize that WYSIWYG can be a complicated and not fully achievable thing when you're traversing media, like getting what you seen on screen to look close to what comes off a printer. But all I want is consistency ON THE VERY SAME #*%@@!! MONITOR! I want what I see when I look at my cover art in iTunes to look exactly the same as it did when I was editing it in Photoshop.
Is that too much to ask?
Here's a screenshot with the iTunes view of an album cover seen behind the Photoshop view of the same image:
In this example, you can see a that the slightly orangy red seen in Photoshop becomes distinctly brighter and more orange seen in iTunes. I'm sure the problem has something to do with color spaces and color profiles and whatnot, but I have no clue what to do to fix it.
I've tried turning Proof Colors on and off, and when Proof Colors are switched on I've tried Mac RGB, Windows RGB, Monitor RGB, and various settings from the custom menu like sRGB IEC61966-2.1, Apple RGB, ColorMatch RGB, Generic RGB, e-sRGB, CIE RGB, etc.
I've tried saving files as both TIFF and PNG, with and without embedding an sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile (the only profile that is ever offered) in the saved files.
All of these things produce changes, sometimes subtle, sometimes hideous, but I haven't found a combination or permutation which gives me what I really want... WYSIWYG.
I realize that WYSIWYG can be a complicated and not fully achievable thing when you're traversing media, like getting what you seen on screen to look close to what comes off a printer. But all I want is consistency ON THE VERY SAME #*%@@!! MONITOR! I want what I see when I look at my cover art in iTunes to look exactly the same as it did when I was editing it in Photoshop.
Is that too much to ask?
Comments
In Photoshop, is your image in layers? A lot of the time people notice color changes after flattening an image.
I often work in layers, but I flatten images before using them as cover art. I've never seen a color shift happen while flattening anyway, plus I can open the same flattened image in Photoshop that I add to a song in iTunes and I'll still see color differences between how the image looks in Photoshop and how it looks in iTunes.
I've a suspicion it could be that itunes is using OpenGL. There is a program called Xee for OS X that is able to display images very quickly because it uses OpenGL but the colors look different from using GraphicConverter or Photoshop.
Perhaps it's the difference between hardware and software rendering.
What does it look like in Preview?
Looks the same in Preview as it does in iTunes. It seems like Photoshop is altering the colors in presents to me no matter what I do, with the Proof Colors mode on or off. Photoshop must think it's being helpful, trying to present me with "truer" colors somehow, but truer to what?
I found an awful hack to get the results I want...
- Edit in Photoshop.
- Do a screen capture from Photoshop.
- Load screen capture PNG into GraphicConverter.
- Trim away extraneous pixels in GraphicConverter (I drag-select over a slightly larger area than the cover art image when I do my screen capture to make sure I don't miss anything).
- Save trimmed PNG.
- Drag PNG into iTunes.
This is not a workflow I want to have to use as standard operating procedure.Once I've gotten all old Photoshop-edited artwork fixed up this way, I'm going to trash my Photoshop prefs and see if that clears out any weird settings that might be messing me up. If something is broken right now, however, I have to leave it that way until I capture all saved images which look the way I want them to look in Photoshop with the current, possibly weird, settings.
Honestly, is this really that big of a deal for you?
Let me put it this way...
I wasn't satisfied with the artwork for David Bowie's album Tonight that I found online on Amazon or Walmart. So I scanned the cover art from my own copy of the CD.
But there was a problem. A nearly quarter-inch diameter patch of the cover art was missing -- it looks like it stuck to the inside of the jewel case and peeled off. That's as bad a flaw by my picky standars, if not a worse flaw, than anything I was trying to avoid with the online cover art I wasn't pleased with.
What did I do? I found the best user-posted album cover on Amazon, copied out just the missing patch, and meticulously size-match and color-matched that patch and blended it into my own new scan of my CD's damaged cover art.
Yes, I'm that anal about this stuff.
Here's Amazon's main image for the album. The best that can be said for this image is that it's 500x500 pixels. Increasingly, a lot of Amazon's artwork is much smaller.
As you can see, this is crap quality. JPEG artifacts galore, big white dust flecks, etc. It looks like the image might have been scanned without bothering to take the CD booklet out of the CD jewel case. At least the picture isn't off-angle, and doesn't have a lot of the edges cropped off like many other Amazon scans.
Here's a much better scan posted by an Amazon customer, R. J. Sorensen, again at 500x500 (even if you post higher res, Amazon scales customer images down to no more than 500x500):
Much better than Amazon's, but still grainy, a little dusty, and the colors aren't that good compared to the actual CD artwork (for instance, the face should be a medium dark purplish blue, not the brighter, more lavender color shown).
Here's what Walmart had. If I'd never seen the my own cover art, so I'd be unaware of the excess contrast and color shift towards blue, I might have been satisfied with this 500x500 image. As online artwork goes, this is one of the better scans I've seen:
Now, here's my own 600x600 scan. It should be noted that my cover art has to be a slightly different version of the same cover -- my cover shows the title "Tonight" as white text, whereas all of the other scans show dark or black text (not that you can even make out the text anymore in Amazon's crappy image):
10 points to whoever can figure out where I had to patch my image.
At any rate, is the full obsessive extent of my anal retentive approach to cover art sinking in yet?
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archiv...p/t-26124.html
Maybe the suggestions on this site will help:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archiv...p/t-26124.html
Thanks. I'll have to try this out when I get home -- it's probably the Color Settings under the Edit menu, something I missed because I expected anything affecting something as basic and important as how colors are presented to you for all documents to be part of the Preferences settings. Color Settings isn't for one particular document like pretty much everything else in the Edit menu.
I guess historically Preferences was in the Edit menu where Color Settings is now, and when it got moved to the Photoshop menu, as is the OS X way of doing things, Color Settings (and a few other global setting in the bottom quarter of the Edit menu) failed to follow behind.
At any rate, is the full obsessive extent of my anal retentive approach to cover art sinking in yet?
You go! In all honesty I'm not so compulsive about the album art *quality* so far but this is exactly the sort of detail I'm anal about, so hats off to you for working on it to your satisfaction, rather than convincing yourself that a library full of DRAG ARTWORK HERE is preferable.
Personally I'm very anal about getting the original album detail. Greatest hits, soundtracks, compilations, promotional samplers - all are smashed into constituent tracks in the supercollider that is iTunes. My importing and library building is going at a relatively deliberate pace because I research and edit the tag detail, and I enjoy it. I'm also pretty insistent on getting the composer credits.
It's just more interesting to me to know that "Me and Mrs. Jones" is off 1972's 360 Degrees of Billy Paul, rather than where I found it, a used copy of the 1995 Beautiful Girls soundtrack.