Photoshop CS3 and my Mac Pro...
I think I have a problem. I always save my work as .psd files, and these look like they are supposed to. When ever I goto save my work as a JPEG, or anything else, when I open it in preview it looks a lot brighter then it does in Photoshop, it looks white washed. I have tried different settings, different formats, I even tried .pdf. I do a lot of print work, and I'm worried now that if I give a client some of these files and they get them printed, it will look horrible. What should I do? Should I try calibration software? Could it be a setting in Photoshop? I used CS2 fine on the same computer, as soon as I switched to CS3, it became a problem. I downloaded the updates and everything as well. Any ideas on what to do?
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Any ideas on what to do?
Don't use preview to look at your images. Seriously.
I find that it does a horrible job at properly displaying images. You might try to consider some test images into iPhoto or some other image program and see if it looks any better in there. I'm pretty certain it will.
Photoshop, by default, will use its own colour management system and tries to adjust the image on screen based on whatever colour profile you have selected in Photoshop and the colour profile from the image.
If you set the same same colour profile in System Preferences and in Photoshop, and set Photoshop to use ColorSync as its colour management system, Preview should display the image identically to Photoshop. Well, in theory anyway
Whether or not you want to set Photoshop to use ColorSync as the colour management system is up to you. This is a thorny subject however, and some people have rather, er, strong opinions on which system is better and what you should be doing.
Ultimately, my feelings are that you should go for whatever looks good for you. Unless you need to send your photos to a professional print shop, in which case I'd suggest spending some time learning about colour management theory and how it works in Photoshop.
Do calibrate your screen though, using either Apple's ColorSync utility or something more professional involving one of those sensors you place on the screen. When you have a profile created, select it in the Display system prefs.
Choosing which colour profile you should set in the Photoshop colour management prefs is a bit more objective... In my own experience I would set the colour profile you just created as the profile for Photoshop and set this profile to be included when saving files. This way, when others open your file, the colour management system they are using will adjust the colours on screen based on the profile you saved with the image and on whatever colour profile they have selected for their display.
Mind you, if you're sending images to print shops you should be converting all your images to CMYK anyway. Then save the image with a generic CMYK profile.
There are people who argue that you shouldn't use your own profiles in Photoshop and instead use something generic like Adobe RGB 1998 because:
A) It's a wide gamut profile that gives you more colours than you could ever hope to display on a normal CRT monitor.
It is a complicated subject, and experts in the area can demand a fair amount of money doing colour management work for others. My own knowledge stems from my Adobe certifications (ACE & ACI) for Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS. Plus a few years working as a 2nd line analyst for Adobe tech support. And honestly, I know the basics, but I'm by no means an expert.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Phot...55E987DFB.html
http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Phot...B1D991390.html
If you want something that's a little less technical and with more real-world examples, head down to your local library and have a look around their tech section. They'll often have books for older versions of Photoshop kicking around - they're perfectly fine. The functionality of the product hasn't changed much in the last 5 years.
If you'd like something video based you could do worse than to check out Total Training. Again your local library might have some older releases of these videos. I find some of the presenters kinda annoying and goofy, but the information they provide is pretty solid, particularly some of the Premier Pro stuff.
If you set the same same colour profile in System Preferences and in Photoshop, and set Photoshop to use ColorSync as its colour management system, Preview should display the image identically to Photoshop. Well, in theory anyway
Yeah that's what I do. I used to use the Adobe profile in Photoshop and it gives really deep vivid colors but the trouble is that whenever you export for the web, it desaturates everything because 'the web' uses sRGB - by that I mean the majority of end users (Windows users) will use sRGB. Plus if you don't set the display profile to the same one, you get the color mismatch between PS and every other program and setting it to Adobe then means you're not seeing web pages as they were intended because they assume you use sRGB (the washed out standard that came from PC monitors - we seem to get a lot of crappy standards from PC users).
So, I now have my display and PS set to use the sRGB colorspace and it seems to work out ok for me. I don't do stuff with print though - my brother does and he said they use a hardware device that reads the screen and that calibrates the display:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...-profile.shtml
Then he gets profiles for the devices he has to output to. All these profiles seem complicated but they are just colorspace translators. The file itself has a set of colors that are fixed RGB values - assuming 32-bit, it's 256 values of R,G and B. However, you don't know if an output device can generate the same range of colors as another so a value of 128,0,0 might produce two different colors on different output devices as that number is mapped to a different range of colors.
So a colorspace profile translates the image for a specific device based on the tagged profile of an image - the display and workspace profiles do so for your screen display and the printer ones do so for your printed output.
http://www.gballard.net/psd/cs.html
http://www.gballard.net/nca.html
Yeah that's what I do. I used to use the Adobe profile in Photoshop and it gives really deep vivid colors but the trouble is that whenever you export for the web, it desaturates everything because 'the web' uses sRGB - by that I mean the majority of end users (Windows users) will use sRGB. Plus if you don't set the display profile to the same one, you get the color mismatch between PS and every other program and setting it to Adobe then means you're not seeing web pages as they were intended because they assume you use sRGB (the washed out standard that came from PC monitors - we seem to get a lot of crappy standards from PC users).
So, I now have my display and PS set to use the sRGB colorspace and it seems to work out ok for me. I don't do stuff with print though - my brother does and he said they use a hardware device that reads the screen and that calibrates the display:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tu...-profile.shtml
Then he gets profiles for the devices he has to output to. All these profiles seem complicated but they are just colorspace translators. The file itself has a set of colors that are fixed RGB values - assuming 32-bit, it's 256 values of R,G and B. However, you don't know if an output device can generate the same range of colors as another so a value of 128,0,0 might produce two different colors on different output devices as that number is mapped to a different range of colors.
So a colorspace profile translates the image for a specific device based on the tagged profile of an image - the display and workspace profiles do so for your screen display and the printer ones do so for your printed output.
http://www.gballard.net/psd/cs.html
http://www.gballard.net/nca.html
I have to get home tonight and play around with all this. Thanks for the info. Looking at all this now, I feel like they should cover some of this in school. This is some confusing sh!t, to me anyway.
I know nothing about Macs as I am on the verge of switching, However, I do all my printing through a wonderful program called Qimage and I get perfect results. (Colorwise.)
Color profiles can be some difficult things to get a grasp of, but I can recommend something when you've calibrated your monitor, use that screen profile and want to save a jpg via Save as for Web...
There's a tab above the Save as for Web dialog "(>)" that you should set to Use Document Color Profile. If you use web colors to match against a background web color, this will ensure that if you create an image with one, it matches perfectly. It also stops the screen profile from shifting to an "improper", lightened color.
I calibrated my monitor and i selected the profile, but now I dont know how to set adobe to use colorsync. Can anyone help me out?
In Photoshop CS1 you would go the menu Photoshop CS > Color Settings, then under the section for Conversion Options set the Engine to "Apple ColorSync".
I expect they changed things around in CS3 though... Have a search through the help files for "colorsync" and "color management".
In Photoshop CS1 you would go the menu Photoshop CS > Color Settings, then under the section for Conversion Options set the Engine to "Apple ColorSync".
I expect they changed things around in CS3 though... Have a search through the help files for "colorsync" and "color management".
Thanx, I'll look for it when I get home today.