Does photoshop preview your colors accurately?

Baldy

We get quite a few help emails about photos in Photoshop not looking like they do when displayed from a web browser on smugmug. The answer we give is to set Photoshop's working space to sRGB and make sure you convert the your images to the working space.

But here I have a Windows XP machine with Photoshop 7 with the working space set to sRGB, and notice the difference between this photo in Photoshop (left) and in a browser (right). What gives? Does Photoshop not have the correct monitor profile?



Thanks,
Baldy

DavidTO

Baldy,

As you know, I've been struggling with this myself. The one thing I would try is to turn off color management altogether and see if they match then.

Baldy

DavidTO wrote:

Baldy,

As you know, I've been struggling with this myself. The one thing I would try is to turn off color management altogether and see if they match then.

Thanks, David. I'm on a serious hunt for authoritative answers to this and it appears there could be several.

This page was interesting and lists several possibilities:

http://www.gballard.net/psd/saveforwebshift.html

Let's nail this.

michael972

I've been having problems too. I use C1 Pro for RAW conversion, and the colors do not look the same after the 16bit tiff is opened in Photoshop CS.
I am sure I am using adobe RGB as working space in both programs.

Baldy wrote:

We get quite a few help emails about photos in Photoshop not looking like they do when displayed from a web browser on smugmug. The answer we give is to set Photoshop's working space to sRGB and make sure you convert the your images to the working space.

But here I have a Windows XP machine with Photoshop 7 with the working space set to sRGB, and notice the difference between this photo in Photoshop (left) and in a browser (right). What gives? Does Photoshop not have the correct monitor profile?



Thanks,
Baldy

PerezDesignGroup

I found an interesting article here that I believe explains this.

http://www.colorwizzard.com/assets/ColorWizzard%20profiles%20and%20Photoshop.pdf

Here's the sum up...

The working space and monitor profile are very different:

· Monitor profiles describe how your monitor displays color (what valueequals what color on your monitor)

· Working spaces define the color appearances of files in a standard, and abstracted way (what value equals what color on a standard, ideal,theoretical device)

When Photoshop displays an image file on screen, it converts:

· First, the image data from its color space (defined by an embedded profile) to the working space (depending your settings, this step is skipped when the color spaces are identical or you may be asked for instructions)

· Then, the pixel values from the working space to the monitor color space by using the monitor profile defined by the OS (in this case created by ColorWizzard).

These display-only pixel values are only used to send data to the monitor but are not otherwise associated with the file (the working space is). Working spaces are required because monitor color space is too limited to be used as a master color space to preserve a files original color data. For example, monitors can’t reproduce cyan that printing presses can, so if a monitor profile was used as a working space all the cyan colors in the file would be limited to what a monitor could display, even if it was printed on a printing press.

If I understand correctly, photoshop needs to put in an extra effort to display colors as they would print. So it doesn't rely on your monitor's profile (ICC) to do this. So what you see in IE/Windows Explorer isn't a good representation of the images true printing tone. Thus accounting for the difference.

Or did I totally mess up