Advanced colour management

(nice beta)
I can see that my copy of Safari reads and uses embedded iccc profiles in images: that's no news and I can confirm it works fine.
But what it doesn't seem to do is to use the assigned output device profile to display web content. That's odd.. maybe I've not set something up correctly... let me explain....
My monitor's calibrated to be as close to sRGB as it can be set. The calibration's stored in the nVidia look up table (LUT). It's close to sRGB, but it's not bang-on. Fortunately the colorimeter people (ColorVision) know you can never get things precisely correct, and so when you calibrate your monitor they provide you with a "monitor profile". That's assigned to the monitor via the Operating system. On a PC the profile's not used by the OS: it's there to be read by applications.
So if I run PS/CS3 and look at images with various colour profiles, they all look as you'd expect. That's because CS3 both reads the embedded profiles, and also it reads the monitor profile from the OS, and munges the output accordingly. My colours are fine in PS/CS3.
Finally I get to the question...
When I run Safari, is it* intended* to read the monitor profile and make use of it?
I kind of expected it to, as there's limited utility in parsing embedded profiles if you don't render the output correctly. It would actually be more useful to deal with the monitor profile than to read embedded profiles. If it should do this, then this is a defect. If it shouldn't, then I'll worry about something else.
To be clear, I'm talking about minor differences which 99% of people probably can't see.
Lisa Windows Vista

What will confirm that Safari is actually working correctly is by looking at the three tagged files in the top-center column -- these should look the same (except for the drop shadow in one of the files).
Yes, they do look the same, i.e. Safari recognizes the profiles and converts them to the same color space. However, that is no proof that this space is the monitor color space.
All this means Safari may still be reading the profile and converting to sRGB, as you seem to be suggesting, but I doubt it because that's not the way color managed applications work. How have you came to believe this?
As you also said, many monitors are 'close' to sRGB, so it is not always easy to distinguish between monitor RGB and sRGB. To avoid this, I have temporarily calibrated to a gamma of 1.0 (1.8 works as well, but 1.0 is even more obvious). This extreme gamma adjustment is done through the video LUT, so it applies to all programs, color managed or not. Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom respond by compensating accordingly, so that the output appears correct after all. Safari doesn't, so we can conclude that Safari does not (fully/correctly) take the monitor profile into account.
So, given that my choice of profile does not seem to affect Safari's display, the next logical option is that some 'standard' target space is used. sRGB seems the most likely candidate. I have just verified that sRGB is indeed used, by comparing a Safari screenshot (the data that gets sent to the display) with the sRGB source image on your page. They are identical.
Still, testing sRGB is the trickiest space to look at because it is designed to mimic our monitor...though if other Windows users could confirm there is no noticable difference between the tagged/untagged sRGB files, I could become a believer that Windows assumes-assigns-applies sRGB to untagged files.
No, I don't think this is Windows' doing, as Safari is the only program showing such (broken) behavior. Also, note that it happens to tagged and untagged files. I think it's a Safari CM bug.
Simon
Message was edited by: simon_t

Similar Messages

How to mimic non colour managed environment in CS6

Can anyone tell me please if it is possible to see in Photoshop what an image will look like when it is out in the un-colour managed world?.I can see how you can do it if you are saving for web because you can preview it in a browser, but is it possible to do this with TIFs and PSDss please?
I have a wide colour gamut display and even with it set to sRGB colour mode emulation, sRGB tagged images that look correctly saturated in Photoshop look oversaturated once out of it and in an uncolour managed environment - particularly the reds. If I can replicate this environment in PS I can edit the colours to make them more neutral looking.
Thanks.

I think you are very wise t have x2 sRGB displays. If a large sRGB display had been available I would have bought it.
Could you bear to help me with another - display issue,please?
As part of the work I do I have to make screen recordings of images being produced for the magazine. I use Camtasia for this and they insist on a 1024x768 resolution. This has been no problem in the past with my standard sRGB display (NEC 2490/2) because the aspect ratio was right for it.
The aspect ratio was not right for the Spectraview display (2560x1440) so I used the original 2490 also attached to my graphics card to make the recordings at 1024x768.
Now, something has changed in the arrangements and when I set the 1920x1200 display to 1024x768 the image stretches as if it were in the wide display. I am defeated as to why the standard display can no longer show 1024x768 at the correct aspect ratio.
I am not aware of having changed any W7 settings - both displays are recognised. Though I do notice that under the "advanced settings for the W7 resolution window, and under the "Monitor" tab, the 2490 is not available - only the wider display (271) - here is an image that shows this:
When you open the "Colour Management" tab all the resolutions are available for the 2490/2 but as I said, when you select the 1024x768, it appears as it would (and does) on the wider display.
Can you suggest what I've done wrong and how I might fix this, please.
Thanks.

Colour management issues! help!!!

Hi,
I have just bought a new printer. an Epson 1430 artisan. And Illustrator won't let me print anything it comes up with an error about colour management being inconsistent.
Just wondering how I can fix this? I need this for my home business and need to use it ASAP.
Thank you

The monitor calibration becomes important when what you see on the screen does not match what you see in your prints. What system are you using PC or Mac? Your monitor may have some controls for such things as brightness. Check the manual to see how you can achieve a fairly decent brightness level ( depending on the screen itself ). Look for the monitor control panel on your computer and see if you can find "Display Preferences > Calibrate". If you have it there are several adjustments that can be made, including "White Point". As I previously mentioned, the Epson 1430 Artisan has a User's Guide that shows you how to access advanced settings in the Print dialogues. That printer, along with many others, is a photographic printer that can achieve a decent color gamut. You have to do some reading and some experiments to establish what works for your particular print application(s). You almost surely are not limited to photography because you printed using Illustrator. In Illustrator, you may want to match colors more closely than you would in a photographic environment like Photoshop. You have told us what type of business and/or what type of printing you do on a daily basis. Just that colors do not match from what look great on screen to what looks like crap in prints. Color management is a very sophisticate and complex issue that is not quite addressed properly by the average consumer. But, ask any professional photographer and they can rattle off their settings in a heartbeat. Open up Illustrator's Color Settings > Advanced dialogue and take a look at some of the work spaces you have to choose from. Look at things like "Rendering Intent" and "Black Point Compensation". I'm a graphic designer. I select and maintain ( in Illustrator ) Rendering Intent = Relative Colorimetric. I have "Black Point Compensation" selected or "ON". My RGB workspace is Adobe RGB; CMYK workspace is US Sheetfed Coated ( SWOP ) v2. My document color space is always CMYK. See if you get some better results using them. By the way, most, if not all, monitors are sold with a White point and brightness too high for Illustrator work.

Photoshop 7 Colour Management Problem (WinXP)

Hi,
I just a problem studio while swapping over 2 Windows XP machines, having swapped over the 1st PC Photoshop 7 lost it's colour management settings.
All images viewed now appeared hazey to the user. So we swapped the PCs back to the original monitor however the colour settings we are prompted for
when opening Photoshop 7 have now been lost..
We tried alll the colour management templates listed but these are not right.
Is there away we can restore the original settings? Could these settings be saved in a file somewhere on the PCs hard disk?
Thanks in advanced.

The color settings should be in C:\Documents and Settings\Anita\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop 7\ somewhere or they are in Photoshop's program directory under a Presets\Color folder
Mylenium

Basic colour management questions

Hi,
I am a biology PhD student and I am reasonably proficient in using computers for everything except when it comes to colour management. I frequently encounter people at Uni who struggle when working on posters etc. because the colours do not print the way they looked on their monitors. I try to explain that most computer monitors are not calibrated correctly.
Anyway, I have my monitor calibrated, the area where I run into trouble is when assigning colour profiles. For example, I need to scan some photos using a flat bed scanner, and I don't know which colour profile to assign it. Should I assign it the calibrated profile that I created or will this only work on my computer. I need to be able to share these images and know that they will look the same on other computers.
I also don't understand what is meant by converting to a working space. I have an Apple PDF about Tiger colour management but it is a bit too technical for me.
Basically I was hoping someone could explain the basics to me or point me towards a good article.
One last question, the scanner I use is a very old UMAX Astra 2100U scanner that does not work in OS X. I have to boot up in Windows and scan there then go back to OS X. Am I likely to run into problems taking the picture between the two OSes?
Thank-you in advance,
Ben

Ben_ wrote:
What is the point of using profiles other than these two. For example, I know most digital cameras embed their own profile. Is there an advantage to using this over say Adobe RGB or should I always convert these images to Adobe RGB or sRGB?
Scanner & camera profiles have two main purposes AFAICT: in colour-managed environments where the original file is sent to a printer or displayed on a monitor, the profile will enable the output to be adjusted for the idiosyncracies of the imaging device; and when opening a file for editing, the device profile will (in theory at least) allow a more accurate conversion to the program’s working space.
If I was editing an image that I planned to print, why would I use Adobe RGB rather than convert the image to CMYK mode? Or is the colour mode (CMYK vs RGB) separate from the colorsync profile?
Yes, there are various CMYK profiles as well: some are for particular printers, while others (like SWOP, Standard Web Offset Printing) attempt to encapsulate typical commercial printing environments. I work in prepress, where CMYK is always the eventual destination—but a printer that uses six or more colours of ink can often represent a larger portion of the RGB gamut than a four-colour press can, for example producing more vivid blues than would be possible in CMYK.
Another issue is that CMYK images that have been optimized for prepress often look somewhat dull or ‘washed out’ on a monitor, especially one that has a high colour temperature (as is typical outside a prepress environment). If the image been tagged with an appropriate CMYK profile, the display may be able to compensate to some extent, but conversion from RGB to CMYK very frequently results in some ‘shoehorning’ of a wide range of colours into a narrower one.

Yet another colour management question

Hi folks,
I've read several of the very detailed colour management posts/threads here already but haven't found the answer(s) I'm looking for. So I'm hoping that some of the experts might be able to spare me some time and input...
I am running a Windows 7 (32bit) environment with a Dell u2711 Ultrasharp display attached. I let the monitor warm up for close on 30 minutes and ran an 'Easy' calibration with a Lacie eye-one device using the Gretag Macbeth 3.6 software. (I guess I could have used the 'Advanced' calibration option but thought I'd save myself some time and was always pleased with the results on my older Sony CRTs.)
I'm running LR3.2 and CS4. Viewing RAW images in LR the skin tones are way too saturated, but when I export the images as sRGB JPEGs the results look very pleasing when viewed in Windows Photo Viewer (far less saturated). If I open the same image in IE, it looks identical to the way it looks in LR. (I don't have Firefox installed so haven't compared that). If I open the image in CS4 by default it looks the same as it does in Windows, but if I change the Proof Setup to Monitor RGB it matches what I am seeing in LR and IE.
I'm guessing this is somehow related to the new wider gamut range that this monitor can display (compare to my previous CRTs). I read in one of Jao's posts that LR is always right and other non-managed apps will do weird things on high-end displays. IE is not colour managed so why would it display colours very similar to what I'm seeing in LR, when the standard Windows image viewer is displaying colour far less saturated (which seems to be the opposite to what others are experiencing)?
I generally always export as sRBG jpeg as the images usually go online, but this set is going to a client who will most likely be taking them for printing as well as viewing on a PC.
Looking forward to your input on this.
Kind regards,
Chris

Hi again all,
I've finally found some time yesterday to investigate this further and re-calibrate my monitor.
I nuked the previously created ICC monitor profile (so that there was none applied) and set to work with my Lacie Blue Eye device and the Lacie Blue Eye Pro software package. I set my preferred settings to 6500K, Gamma 2.2, 120cd/m2 and put the monitor into 'Standard' colour preset. I ran a test on those settings and while the colour and gamma levels were close-ish, the Lum was in the mid-high 200s...way too bright. (No wonder I felt like I was getting a tan sitting in front of the monitor. LOL!) DeltaE scores were okay but not great... Time for the manual calibration.
Set the monitor into 'Custom' colour preset and fired up the Lacie calibration software for the full calibration. Can't remember exactly how far the brightness and contrast controls had to come down, but from memory it was about 30 and 50 respectively. The RGB levels ended up in the high 80s each from memory. Ran the calibration, applied the newly created profile (double checked it was applied in Control Panel | Colour Management). Ran another test report with the Lacie software and got colour, gamma and lum results 0-1% from target, and average dE scores of 0.4, max dE of 0.7.
RAW files in LR and PS CS4 appear the same, sRGB jpeg exports viewed in Windows Photo Viewer and Firefox appear the same, IE is still a bit out, but that's expected/known.
I took the (exported jpeg) images to another computer with a cheapy (uncalibrated) LCD monitor and the results were perfectly fine when viewed in Windows Photo Viewer.
Having greatly reduced the brightness of my monitor I should hopefully reduce the likelihood of having issues with prints coming back too dark. Of course I know I can get hold of the printer profiles from my lab and softproof the images in CS4 when it comes to that anyway.
Thank you all for your input and feedback on this matter. Everything seems to be resolved now.
Chris

Printing Colour Issues - colour management settings

Hi there
I've been having some serious printing problems recently when I print from InDesign CS5 and also from Acrobat when printing PDFs exported from InDesign.
All of the print out colours a wrong (such as Blacks printing as pink)
I have tried changing several settings, but nothing seems to be fixing it.
I've replaced all my inks and I can print fine when printing in other programs such as word, so its not an ink issue.
My printer is a Canon MP540
I'm using a Mac, on OS X Lion.
I think i'm using the default colour management settings, however could this possibly be the issue?- which settings might work?
I would REALLY APPRECIATE any help with this issue!
Many Thanks

if I look at the same image in the default 'Preview' on Mac, the
colours look different to what I see in PS
First, that would clearly indicate your image does not have an embedded profile, or Ps is being told to ignore the embedded profile — Ps is applying a different profile (or it may have been dinked around with in its Edit> Color Settings> More Options> Advanced Controls).
It is best for most people not to dink around with Color Settings> More Options...to get back a Default starting point, just select a preset like North American Prepress 2.
I know there are a million posts and articles on this complex subject
You only need one good article to grasp the basic issues.
The short answer is you are either missing something in scenario One, or you are hitting a bug.
When Photoshop setups a correct SourceSpace-to-PrintSpace Conversion the Epson will print your file faithfully if your Source Color is within print gamut and your Print Space reflects an accurate ICC profile to the specific printer-paper-ink you are printing to.
I would recommend testing with a known good file like the download Photodisc PDI test image (so bad files don't confuse the process)...

How to turn off all colour management?

I need to have Photoshop show me an image without any colour management at all.
However, no matter what settings I try the image in Photoshop always looks different to the same image opened in a program that is not ICC complient.
This is causing me serious problems.
What do I need to do to turn off all ICC management?

The quickest way is to choose View - Proof Setup in Photoshop and just select Monitor RGB. When View - Proof Colors is selected, you will see unaltered data, as Photoshop is being told that the image should be viewed as though its profile is the same as the monitor's profile.
However, it is not difficult to get Photoshop to send unaltered values from an sRGB document to your display without using Proof viewing. My system is set up this way as I have my video card tables and monitors set up to accurately show sRGB.
Here's how:
1. Start the Windows 7 control panel Color Management function, Devices tab, and uncheck [ ] Use my settings for this device.
2. In the Advanced tab, ensure that Windows Color System Defaults is System default (sRGB IEC61966-2.1).
Voila, Photoshop considers the monitor as having the sRGB profile, and you'll see the exact same color values from an sRGB image as from a non-color-managed application.
Photoshop will also display colors from documents with other profiles correctly, as they are transformed to sRGB for display.
FYI, I have the ATI Catalyst display manager load my video card color settings at startup.
Hope this helps.
-Noel

My problem is that after printing the first photo or picture, when I come to print a second, both the Colour Management and Epson Colour Controls are greyed out and showing No Colour Management

I have recently purchased a Mac computer (updated to Maverick) to go with my Epson Stylus Photo RX500 printer which has given excellent service with my old Windows computer. However, when trying to print pictures or photos via Photoshop Elements 11, the best results I can get are using the Colour Management and Epson Colour controls in the printing options box.
My problem is that after printing the first photo or picture, when I come to print a second, both the Colour Management and Epson Colour Controls are greyed out and showing No Colour Management, The only way I can reset the controls is to shut down the printer and computer and restart.
Could there may be a setting somewhere that I need to adjust please? I have been in touch with Epson and they say that the Epson Colour controls are part of the Photoshop Elements software but a post on the Adobe forum brought no results and I am unable to contact Adobe.
<Edited by Host>

Hello Garry. Thanks for the reply. I guess I should have used a different title from "How do I post a question?" That should come after trying to resolved the colour settings first. However, to answer your question, after experimenting with all the different settings in Photoshop Elements and Epson software, I now start with PSE11 Colour settings then click "no colour management" then after clicking Print, I choose "More Options/Colour Management/Colour Handling/Printer Manages Colour" then I choose "Page Setup/Layout/Colour Matching" which then shows Epson Colour Controls but I also choose "Layout/Colour Management" which then shows "Colour Controls/Mode" I then of course choose an Epson printer profile depending on the paper I am using. I get good results but as I said, the Colour Matching and Colour Controls are then greyed out. Hope that makes sense.

Colour Management - who does what - Some thoughts now the smoke is clearing

First up, thanks very much to everyone who contributed their ideas and expertise to my recent query here, when I was seeking help for a problem with colour management issues when printing a magazine I edit. I have a ton of suggestions to work through and study but the smoke is slowly clearing and it raises some interesting points which I think are worth recounting.
First of all, I have been editing short run magazines now for 25 years, at first part time and later on a professional contract basis. I am not a trained graphic designer nor a trained printer. I did start out training as a graphic designer, many years ago but gave it up for a career in IT (as a networking specialist). That was full time until 10 years ago, although I did some freelance writing and editing in my spare time.
And yes, I did start originally with scissors and cut and paste, and moved on through black and white with spot colour and Pagemaker software to full colour and InDesign today. One thing which may be different about my experience to most of yours is that I am a PC user and always have been. All my editing and graphics work has always been done on a PC - Pagemaker was our DTP package of choice for a long time and we supplemented this with Corel-Draw (which has a range of graphics handling options). All my software is legal and I always register it and keep it up to date. I have used the same graphic designer for quite a few years now and whenever we upgrade our software he goes and gets trained on the latest release.
Around 10 years ago I was offered the chance to edit a specialist short run magazine (not the current one). This was a chance I took and gave up the day job and became a full time freelance. Editing is not my main or only source of income. I am also a freelance writer and photographer and heritage consultant and I have a specialist image library.   I sell my own sell my work - articles and pictures - to the national and local press. I also write books (non fiction) on commission. The magazine editing is really an extension of my interest in historic landscapes. I have never had any complaints, or problems, with the freelance work, photos and archived images I sell. Clients include national newspapers here in the UK, national magazine groups and my books are available in national bookstore chains. I supply my work digitally, naturally, and it includes photos I have taken myself and items which I have scanned into my library of historical images and store on line. No reported colour management issues there.
I have always enjoyed a good relationship with my publishers and printers because I seek to be as professional as possible, which means delivering my stuff on time, to the required standard so that minimum intervention is required from them. This does assume that I have a clear brief from them on what they need from me.
Recently this approach has not been enough to avoid colour management issues with the short run magazine I currently edit. I have been wondering when and where things went astray and date it back to the upgrade to InDesign two years ago. However it may have its roots in my earlier decision to use PCs not Macs for my work.
Until 4 years ago I had used the same printers for magazine editing for many years. They were a well respected firm specialising in short run magazines. They were not far from where I live and work and if there was a problem I would go over and discuss it with them. They were happy, and competent, to handle Pagemaker files generated on a PC and convert my rgb images to cmyk if there was any concern about the colour balance. On a few occasions I paid them to scan a photo for me. However 4 years ago the owner decided to retire and shut up shop. I needed to find a new printers and it had to be someone who specialised in short run magazines and could meet the budget of the charity I edit for. Also someone who could handle copy generated using Pagemaker running on a PC. I chose a printers I had used briefly in the past where I knew some of the staff and was promised PC based Pagemaker would not be a problem. I even got this in writing. I started to send them proofs generated using Pagemaker v7 on my PC.
I soon found that although they had agreed they could handle Pagemaker on a PC in fact they had only a few PC based clients and were using a single ageing PC running Pagemaker to proof their work. In fact nearly all their jobs were Quark based. I was also told we had to supply CMYK images although not given any further requirement so I now did the conversions from rgb to CMYK using my PhotoPaint software. (There are quite a few settings in Corel for the conversion but there was no guidance by the printer on which to use so to be honest it did not occur to me that it might be a problem).
Now of course I understand that the drive to get customers to supply CMYK images was a Quark driven requirement back in the late 1990s. I did not and do not use Quark so knew nothing for this. I did have some early colour problems and font incompatibilities with the new printers and was pressured by their senior Graphic Designer (who designed for their own contract clients) to upgrade to InDesign and provide them with a .pdf, which I was assured would solve all my problems. The .pdf would be the same as the final printed magazine because "it would not require any further intervention by the printers".
I expect you are collectively throwing up your hands in horror at this point, but I think he was speaking genuinely. The creation of a .pdf using InDesign, is widely promoted as the ultimate answer to all printing issues.   I have encountered it recently with a lot of printers' salesmen and my friend, who edits a learned journal, has just been told the same thing by her printers, to get her to upgrade to ID. Incidentally she also uses a PC.
So we upgraded our design process in house to InDesign and our graphic designer went on a course, two courses in fact. When we came to produce our first .pdf using ID, the printers' Senior Graphic designer came on the phone and talked our designer through the ID Export function. I think he may at that time have told him to create a preset profile with MPC and the defaults, but to be honest I don't recall. We were never sent anything in writing about what settings we needed to match theirs. I continued to have intermittant colour management problems but put this down to my photos. Things came to head with the most recent issue where the colours were badly out on the cover, supplied by a press agency and taken by a professional photographer. The printers seemed to have little or no idea about possible causes.
Initially I thought that part of the underlying cause must lie in some mismatch between what I was sending the printers and what they expected to receive so I asked them to specify what I should send. All they said was use Profile preset as MPC setting and accept the defaults which accompany it.
So I came on here looking for a solution. A lot of people were keen to offer their own experience which I really appreciate. However the messages could be conflicting. Some of you suggested it was the underlying cover photo which was at fault, some that it was my monitor which needed better calibration.
Many of you here said that part of the problem, if not the whole problem, was the way I was generating my CMYKs for the printer and I should use Photoshop to do this. You also mentioned a number of possible colour management settings which I should try.
At times the advice seemed to change tack. There were suggestions that the colour management issues I had were nothing to do with the printers, that it was up to me not them. Quite a lot of you said I needed to be better informed about Colour Management issues. I agree, but I had never had any previously (maybe good luck, maybe good support from my previous printer) so I was not even aware that I needed to be better informed. Some of you mildly chastised me for not finding out more and doing more to manage my own colour management with the switch to ID. To which I can only say if I had needed to train up, I would have done. I did not realise I needed to. Nor was my designer aware of the issues as colour management was not really covered on his ID courses which were about typesetting and design.
Some of you even seemed to hint that unless I was prepared to use an expensive high end printer or effectively retrain as a print specialist or get my graphic designer to do so, then I probably shouldn't be in the magazine editing game at all. OK maybe that is a bit harsh but you get the drift.
The fact is that printing is much more accessible these days to all sorts of people and in particular to people with PCs. My brother lives in a large village in an isolated area and produces a village magazine which has been a great success. It is in black and white with spot colour but he would like to move to an all colour issue. He is a bit nervous of the colour management issues as he has no experience of graphic design and is his own designer using a low end entry level design package. He too uses a PC. The printers reps all tell him the same thing they tell me, that all he needs to supply is a .pdf using InDesign.
Somewhere I feel a black hole has developed, maybe back in the 1990s with Quark 4.11. A lot of printers standardised on that, and set up a work flow and prepress dependent on CMYK images as provided by the clients. They assumed the the clients would doing their own colour management. This approach also assumes everyone is using Quark on a Mac with the full range of Adobe software. When it became possible to generate .pdfs using InDesign, this was held out to users as the Holy Grail of magazine printing, even though their workflows and prepress were still based on Quark 4.11 principles. Any underlying colour management issues the clients now have to tackle themselves.
So now we have the situation in which I find myself, having to learn from scratch a good deal about colour management issues so that I can tell the printers what is needed for my magazine. Meanwhile all the printing salesmen, the ones I encounter anyway, are still busy pushing the InDesign to .pdf as the "be all and end all" solution. Some re-education is needed for all parties I think.

I am glad to see that the sun is peeping through the clouds.
I apologise for my Aussie-style straight talk earlier, but as I said before it was not directed personally at you but in the direction of others whom you epitomize, repeating a conversation I have had many times over the last 10 years or so where respectable, well-meaning photographers, designers and other contributors refuse to accept that colour management is being thrust upon them.
It is a simple fact of life, there is this 'new' thing that has butted into the very root of our trades and changed the most basic principles of printing and photography. We expect that this kind of thing does not happen but the industry we now work in is not the same one we trained in twenty years ago.
Many printers are still struggling with the same conflict, so many tradespeople cannot accept this change.
This is exacerbated by the fact that colour management is so complicated to learn and implement and confounded by the fact that the default settings and a clumsy workflow often yield acceptable results with incorrect, generic settings, hence the old 'use InDesign and make a PDF and it will be ok' route.
When the chain of colour management includes the photographer, the photographer's client, the designer, the other designer maybe, the prepress person, and the platemaker, and a single incorrect click by any one of those can kill the CM it is not surprising that in the end when someone is looking back to see where it fell over they usually never find out.....   They will meet someone who says ' I never touched it, I simply opened the file and scaled it and closed it'. And that person will be a reputable photographer or designer (and CLIENT) who has no idea they just broke it. So what do we do? We go with the generic setting that seems to yield adequate results therefore avoiding the confrontation.
You need to understand the situation of the printer who took his business through the 'early' days of colour management, we had all kinds of very reputable sources supplying incorrect files, we did not have the expertise yet to be able to address the entire workflow, it would have meant training photographers and designers all through the best design houses and national institutions, because they blamed the printer. Only in the last few years have I seen these people coming around to the fact that they bear responsibility for implementing their own cm and maintaining it through their own work.
Sadly, many high end sources are still not there, and I mean HIGH end! Probably the ones that don't even visit this forum because they want to keep blaming the printer... They tend to live with the poor quality reproductions and just pull up the worst ones and fiddle with those and try to avoid the 'elephant in the room'.
I am sorry to say that it was not practical for a printer to reject mismanaged files for fear of losing clients who would happily accept less than perfect results in order to avoid the painful truth that was being told to them. The best thing we could do was to gently make those clients aware that their workflow was imperfect and hope to show them how we could help... Many print shops do not have someone knowledgeable enough or patient enough to do this, or the boss does not understand the issue either and tries to work around it to keep his jobs flowing in the expectation that all those experts in the chain will eventually tame the thing.
The many experts on this holy forum are waaaaayyyy ahead of the printing industry in general and photographers and designers in general in their understanding of colour management workflow. I have seen first hand how reputable local industry people and trainers alike are spreading misinformation and bad techniques, when I discovered these forums back in about 2002 I found that they opened up a whole new galaxy of knowledge and facts that actually worked and made sense, unlike what I had been told locally.... This forum taught me what the Adobe text books did not, the Tech' teachers did not, local 'experts' did not!
I tell all interested people to join these forums and learn to discriminate between the good and bad information.

How do I fix colour picker to work across different colour-managed monitors?

Hey everyone!
I'm assuming this problem I'm having stems from having colour-calibrated monitors, but let me know if I'm wrong!
To preface, this is the setup I have:
Windows 7
3 monitors as follows, all have individual colour profiles calibrated using the Spyder 3
Cintiq 12WX
Dell U2410
Dell 2409WFP
Photoshop CS6 - Proofed with Monitor RGB, and tested with colour-managed and non-colour-managed documents
I usually do most of my work on the Cintiq 12WX, but pull the photoshop window to my main monitor to do large previews and some corrections. I noticed that the colour picker wouldn't pick colours consistently depending on the monitor the Photoshop window is on.
Here are some video examples:
This is how the colour picker works on my Dell U2410: http://screencast.com/t/lVevxk5Ihk
This is how it works on my Cintiq 12WX: http://screencast.com/t/tdREx4Xyhw9
Main Question
I know the Cintiq's video capture makes the picture look more saturated than the Dell's, but it actually looks fine physically, which is okay. But notice how the Cintiq's colour picker doesn't pick a matching colour. It was actually happening the opposite way for a while (Dell was off, Cintiq was fine), but it magically swapped while I was trying to figure out what was going on. Anyone know what's going on, and how I might fix it?
Thanks for *any* help!
Semi-related Question regarding Colour Management
Colour management has always been the elephant-in-the-room for me when I first tried to calibrate my monitors with a Spyder colourimeter years ago. My monitors looked great, but Photoshop's colours became unpredictable and I decided to abandon the idea of calibrating my monitors for years until recently. I decided to give it another chance and follow some tutorials and articles in an attempt to keep my colours consistent across Photoshop and web browsers, at least. I've been proofing against monitor colour and exporting for web without an attached profile to keep pictures looking good on web browsers. However, pictures exported as such will look horrible when uploaded to Facebook. Uploading pictures with an attached colour profile makes it look good on Facebook. This has forced me to export 2 versions of a picture, one with an attached colour profile and one without, each time I want to share it across different platform. Is there no way to fix this issue?
Pictures viewed in Windows Photo Viewer are also off-colour, but I think that's because it's not colour managed... but that's a lesser concern.

I think I've figured out the colour management stuff in the secondary question, but the weird eyedropper issue is still happening. Could just be a quirk from working on things across multiple monitors, but I'm hoping someone might know if this is a bug/artifact.
Going to lay out what I inferred from my experiments regarding colour management in case other noobs like me run into the same frustrations as I did. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong - the following are all based on observation.
General Explanation
A major source of my problems stem from my erroneous assumption that all browsers will use sRGB when rendering images. Apparently, most popular browsers today are colour-managed, and will use an image's embedded colour profile if it exists, and the monitor's colour profile if it doesn't. This was all well and good before I calibrated my monitors, because the profile attached to them by default were either sRGB or a monitor default that's close to it. While you can never guarantee consistency on other people's monitors, you can catch most cases by embedding a colour profile - even if it is sRGB. This forces colour-managed browsers to use sRGB to render your image, while non-colour-managed browsers will simply default to sRGB. sRGB seems to be the profile used by Windows Photo Viewer too, so images saved in other wider gamut colour spaces will look relatively drab when viewed in WPV versus a colour-managed browser.
Another key to figuring all this out was understanding how Profile Assignment and Conversion work, and the somewhat-related soft-proofing feature. Under Edit, you are given the option to either assign a colour profile to the image, or convert the image to another colour profile. Converting an image to a colour profile will replace the colour profile and perform colour compensations so that the image will look as physically close to the original as possible. Assigning a profile only replaces the colour profile but performs no compensations. The latter is simulated when soft-proofing (View > Proof Colors or ctrl/cmd-Y). I had followed bad advice and made the mistake of setting up my proofing to Monitor Color because this made images edited in Photoshop look identical when the same image is viewed in the browser, which was rendering my images with the Monitor's colour profile, which in turn stemmed from yet another bad advice I got against embedding profiles . This should formally answer Lundberg's bewilderment over my mention of soft-proofing against Monitor Colour.
Conclusion and Typical Workflow (aka TL;DR)
To begin, these are the settings I use:
Color Settings: I leave it default at North American General Purpose 2, but probably switch from sRGB to AdobeRGB or ProPhoto RGB so I can play in a wider gamut.
Proof Setup: I don't really care about this anymore because I do not soft-proof (ctrl/cmd-Y) in this new workflow.
Let's assume that I have a bunch of photographs I want to post online. RAWs usually come down in the AdobeRGB colour space - a nice, wide gamut that I'll keep while editing. Once I've made my edits, I save the source PSD to prep for export for web.
To export to web, I first Convert to the sRGB profile by going to Edit > Convert to Profile. I select sRGB as the destination space, and change the Intent to either Perceptual or Relative Colorimetric, depending on what looks best to me. This will convert the image to the sRGB colour space while trying to keep the colours as close to the original as possible, although some shift may occur to compensate for the narrower gamut. Next, go to Save for Web. The settings you'll use:
Embed Color Profile CHECKED
Convert to sRGB UNCHECKED (really doesn't matter since you're already in the sRGB colour space)
and Preview set to Internet Standard RGB (this is of no consequence - but it will give a preview of what the image will look like in the sRGB space)
That's it! While there might be a slight shift in colour when you converted from AdobeRGB to sRGB, everything from then on should stay consistent from Photoshop to the browser
Edit: Of course, if you'd like people to view your photos in glorious wide gamut in their colour-managed browsers, you can skip the conversion to sRGB and keep them in AdobeRGB. When Saving for Web, simply remember to Embed the Color Profile, DO NOT convert to sRGB, and set Preview to "Use Document Profile" to see what the image would look like when drawn with the embedded color profile

How do i turn off colour management in photoshop cc

i cannot make any sense of the 'help' on being able to see any display which allows me to turn off colour management in photoshop cc or in lightroom 5 when using my Mac 10.9.3

Good day!
What exactly do you mean?
Regards,
Pfaffenbichler

A Colour Management tutorial from an amateur

Archiving at the end of a long project I came across a document I assembled at the start when I wanted to teach myself about colour management. I spent several weeks reading, experimenting and putting together these notes, but it all came to nought. To quote from the notes:
…I chose not to use colour management when printing my books on a Xerox iGen3. I converted the InDesign files to PDF with all colour management turned off, and asked the printer to print ‘direct’. The iGen RIP converted RGB images to CMYK, and CMYK images were printed as per the colour numbers. Using certain colour settings for my monitor, and for Photoshop and InDesign, I was able to obtain a very close match between what was on screen and what was on paper without the need for profiles…
I've asked a fair few questions here over the years, and this forum has been a great help, but I rarely offer anything in return. Well, here's a little something that some people might find useful. A mob of information about colour management, collated from various sources with my tuppence worth here and there to make it flow. It was put together before my InDesign days when I used Pages, so forgive the mediocre layout.
Colour Management (450k) can be downloaded here: http://www.mediafire.com/?86edp6742ac6zlv (If Peter Spier is reading this: Peter, that's a hot link now; I've upgraded my Mediafire account so there are no more banners).
If anyone visits here in the future and that link doesn't work (which will happen if I upload a new version), try this one, a link to the folder: http://www.mediafire.com/?an9n0o36nymwv
Please let me know if there are any gross errors in the PDF and I'll fire up Pages and correct them.

geoffseeley, Welcome to the discussion area!
1) amber light keeps flashing but internet works - is this a problem?
I believe that indicates that you do not have wireless encryption enabled. If you enabled wireless encryption, the light should turn green.
3) how does iTunes work through the extreme box? am i supposed to plug my home cinema into the extreme box somehow?
The AirPort Extreme base station (AEBS) has no special features to support video/audio directly. iTunes has nothing to do with the AEBS.
The AirPort Express (AX) has an audio out port for streaming music from iTunes.

Problem with Advanced Security Manager

Hi
I am using the advanced security manager to migrate security from Essbase 7 server to Essbase 11 server. The users who are externally authenticated on essbase 7 server are under native security mode on the Essbase 11 server after security import.Does the Advanced security manager put all the users (whether they are externally authenticated or under native security mode) in native security mode after import?
Please help

Hello 831221
In version 11 "native" means that the users are stored in OpenLDAP (once Essbase was externalized).
You would only be able to create "external" users if the Shared Services have been connected to an external User Source (e.g. MSAD) prior to
importing the users.
best regards
.T

Deleted Colour Setting in Bridge, but Photoshop wants to Colour Manage every time I open a file.

I installed a Colour Setting in Bridge as per a printer's instructions. After I did this, every time I open something in Ps, It asks if it can colour manage the file and gives a few options. I deleted a Creative Suite Colour Setting from finder Bridge, but Photoshop still generates the popup every time. This interferes with Scripts in Ps and it's very annoying.

Deleting something in Bridge certainly won't help.
Change the color settings in Photoshop...

Advanced colour management

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