Colour Profile Woes

[Lesley Jones]

I'm sure I could get my head around colour calibration if I really wanted to, but every time I try and read about the subject, my brain simply switches off. No problem really because I've left it all to my trusty Huey Pro for the past few years and that seemed to be that.

Until I noticed the colour profile was regularly falling off our new PC. At least I thought it was that, but doing a check in Bridge, I found 78 images going back as far as June with the wrong profile. Most of them aren't a problem because they weren't my favourites and never got past the DNG stage. I decided to hide those files a few months ago, so I also saved them quickly as PSD files. The colour on those doesn't matter because they are of the chicken run or the ferret room. However, there are 21 what I consider to be good images and they are giving me a headache.

If I open them in PS and convert to the now working Huey profile they look awful - pale and washed out and with a slight cyan cast. I really don't feel up to doing them again, but I can't understand the implications. I don't print, so that doesn't matter. What about opening up in the "wrong" profile (Adobe RGB 1998), where the colours look good, flattening, saving as a JPG and putting up in here for example, or on my web site or blog? Do those "good" colours stay, or is the image doing something horrible behind my back? I'm not sure I know what is real anymore...

 

[Julian de'Courcy]

I can understand your dilemma.Having processed many images on what I thought was an ok monitor , found later they where all very dark as the monitor was set to bright. When on a high street
I do pop into an apple shop to view my pics online on an imac or pad then judge the images from there. Otherwise I do not have the knowledge to give solid advice.

Maybe post one here and I can tell you if it is way off.?

 

[Chris Dodkin]

Lesley - if you open into AdobeRGB - you are opening them into a larger color space than the web can handle.

There are colors and tones in AdobeRGB that are outside the range of sRGB - with is the lowest common denominator color space for web use.

Suggest you open one in sRGB, and see how it looks - and save from there as a test.

If it looks good in sRGB, it will look good on anyone's web browser.

Most commercial printers also request sRGB images - it solves their 'dosen't look like I expected' problems with customers.

If you're printing your own images at home, you can go with AdobeRGB, and get the benefit by calibrating the printer profile etc - which is a whole story in itself

 

[Lesley Jones]

Cheers Julian and Chris. My brain can't cope at the moment. I try very hard to do non-destructive edits, so when I need to remove dust bunnies, I right click on the smart object in CS5 and edit - that gives me another PSB layer. I think I have a couple of images where that layer has a different profile to the top layer. I've gone back to remove a speck that I missed and the image suddenly gains a lot of saturation.

If my monitor has been properly calibrated for the past few years and the colours look good whatever profile is applied to that image, then I think it should be OK...

... or maybe not

 

[Julian de'Courcy]

Another thing popped into my mind. If the colour management settings have reverted to windows? Look in Control panel> colour management> advance tab> making sure 'use windows display calibration' is not ticked. If so you may need from there to go to 'change system defaults' in the advance tab where you can untick the box.

 

[Lesley Jones]

Cheers Julian - I just checked and the box wasn't ticked...

 

[Julian de'Courcy]

Truth being everyone is seeing our pics differently. I use the 'export for web' in Cs6 so at least there you can choose the simple profiles from the tabs
Three or four I think. Which at least will give some sort of screen profiling. The whole printing lark and profiling is too much for me to take on seriously.
Another way i profile a screen is similar to what some software does. Is to take a pic of a painting of mine with lots of clean colours, and profile the adjustments to
picture, so the screen one looks the same as the one on the wall.

 

[Andy Boardman]

Have a peep at Permajet's website for colour printing tips, they also do custom profiles if you use their paper, well worth doing, I use there products myself & have never had a problem colour wise.We can also supply there paper @ great rates to LOL.