Color management problems - help please!

[Mark_E...@adobeforums.com]

Hello, I'm trying hard to understand color management and to make colors consistent throughout my workflow, and I'm failing miserably despite reading and re-reading the help files. I'd REALLY appreciate some help with my specific problems, which I'm going to detail here.

WHAT I DO
I make pictures for use on the Web. I do both this by photoshopping existing photos, and by digitally drawing and painting in photoshop.

HOW MY SYSTEM IS SET UP
1) I have my monitor set to sRGB, and I've calibrated the colors using the Viewsonic calibration app that came with the monitor. The resulting colors look good, to my eyes at least.
2) I've set up Photoshop to use sRGB as the RGB colorspace, and to convert RGB images to the working colorspace
3) I've set up Photoshop's Save For Web to embed the color profile, to Convert so sRGB, and Preview is set to Use Document Profile

THE PROBLEM I'M HAVING
The preview I see in the Save For Web preview screen exactly matches the source document. However, after saving for web, the color of the jpg or gif is significantly different to that of the original document.
If I change the preview mode to Monitor Color, it does show an accurate representation of the jpg of gif that will be saved, but of course that is drastically different to the source document.

WHAT I NEED
1) I need the output to match the source document
2) I need to understand what's going wrong so that I can gain some insight into this process. I'm finding it very confusing

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

That means that your display is not sRGB. Otherwise it would match sRGB data corrected or not.

[Mark_E...@adobeforums.com]

Chris, thanks for the quick response.
Regarding the disply, I've set it to sRGB, it says it's sRGB, but perhaps you're right, and it is not. If that's the case, do you have any suggestions regarding what I can do, in Photoshop or elsewhere, to fix this situation? To restate, I need the output jpg or gif to match the source document. That's what I want to achieve here.

[pfigen]

Mark,

Chris hit it right on the head. There are a lot of displays that claim t be sRGB but are nowhere near that standard. You really need to use a hardware monitor calibrator like the EyeOne from X-Rite that not only calibrates, but makes a monitor profile that describes your monitor to Photoshop. Then just adjust your images to look good on screen, then save a copy for the web that you convert to sRGB if it's not already. After that, you don't have much control how it's viewed, but at least you know it started out right.

[Mark_E...@adobeforums.com]

pfigen: again, I appreciate the response, but I don't have the equipment you've described and I won't be getting it any time soon, so I need to find a way to get jpg and gif output to match the source document using my current equipment. I have a very standard setup, hundreds of thousands of other users must have similar setups, and there must surely be a way to achieve the very simple thing I'm after using this setup.

If anyone has any suggestions which address my question in terms of changes I can make to Photoshop settings I'd be very grateful.

Thanks.

[pfigen]

Mark,

What model of viewsonic do you have? And is it a CRT or LCD?

If it's a CRT, there are some software based "eyeball" calibrators which can get you in the ballpark. If you have an older version of Photoshop you can use the Adobe Gamma utility that was included in CS2 and earlier versions.

After that, my previous advice still stands, but the best results are still going to be to bite the bullet for a colorimeter and live with the peace of mind that will give you.

If your Viewsonic is an LCD, you're much more limited, as the eyeball calibrators were never designed for LCD's. You can try them and they may be better than nothing, but no guarantees.

[John_...@adobeforums.com]

If your images are in sRgb, why convert to sRgb?

[pfigen]

If you're already in sRGB, then you obviously don't have to do it again. Of course, if you are starting from a dubious starting point - not being sure about the accuracy of your monitor calibration, you can never be sure of exactly the color space, no matter what profile is embedded.