White is not white???

[Joseph_Smith_Sr.@adobeforums.com]

I cannot seem to get pure white within PS CS4.

I opened the Color tab and set the sliders to 255, 255, 255. However, the color displayed is FFFEDC, not FFFFFF.

Can anyone tell me what's going on?

[Bart_...@adobeforums.com]

Monitor profile may be incorrect.

What are your using color management settings?

[Joseph_Smith_Sr.@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for the reply, Bart.

That was my first guess, too. My Samsung monitor was profiled using a colorimiter, so I disabled that profile and tried again. The white in PS CS4 is still FFFEDC.

I did a little more experimenting with these results:

White swatches are FFFFFF in Windows Paint and ACDSee Photo Manager, with or without the monitor profile active. White swatches are always FFFEDC in PS CS4.

I can get white as FFFFFF in a PS image by moving the white slider left in the Levels adjustment panel to the left. Then, I tried to sample the FFFFFF color with the eyedropper, and the sample is FFFEDC again! This is driving me crazy.

The PS color settings are using the Adobe RGB (1998) colorspace.

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

WIndows Paint and ACDSee are not color managed - they'll ignore your display profile entirely.

Photoshop is color managed. Photoshop will correct colors for your display. So most likely your display profile says it is really, really blue and Photoshop is trying to correct for that.

Check that display profile again. Colorimeters can go bad, and profiling software has been known to have bugs.

[Joseph_Smith_Sr.@adobeforums.com]

It's not a monitor profile problem. I have tried three different profiles with the same results.

The problem is that I cannot get or create a white swatch in PS CS4.

If I try and create a white swatch by sampling a single white (FFFFFF) pixel in an open image, the swatch is FFFEDC, not FFFFFF.

If I adjust the RGB color sliders all the way to the right (255, 255, 255), the resulting swatch is not FFFFFF, but FFFEDC.

I cannot seem to create a white (FFFFFF) swatch in PS CS4.

This is really frustrating.

[Joseph_Smith_Sr.@adobeforums.com]

What a dog. But it's fixed!

I deleted the preferences file at startup and I can now paint white!

Woo hoo!

[Bart_...@adobeforums.com]

Cool, nice when it is that easy.