Color Management, (Again!)

Question

I know this has been discussed before, but I still haven't found anything that can help me solve the issue. It's starting to become a serious barrier to professional work, so any thoughts woudl be appreciated.
I have both the eye1Display2 and a Gretag-Macbeth color checker and regularly calibrate my monitor and camera profiles. I'm working with CS5.  The colors in Photoshop are consistently far off from every other applicaiton outside of it. Even Flickr. I assume this is because of the color management, but I've even turned that off, (which gives me a warning message now every time I bring in an image), and the issue still occurs. Worse, the colors displayed working with RAW images are now different to those in the main interface, and even then, they are NOT the same outside of Photoshop, whereas all the other packages are consistent.  My workaround right now is to save regularly and check in other packages but this is simply not good enough for adjusting curves, HSL, etc.  I do a lot of work with skintones, which are particularly color-critical.
So my quesions are - how can I turn Photoshop's color management completely off so it's not applying any lookup at all to the color in any module?
If I WANT it to apply the color profile from the i1Display and the X-Rite Color Checker Passport sofware, how can I know this is being done and carried through from the RAW processing to the rest of the package?
Many thanks
Albert Hastings

Answer 1

ahast42696 wrote:
I have both the eye1Display2 and a Gretag-Macbeth color checker and regularly calibrate my monitor and camera profiles. I'm working with CS5.  The colors in Photoshop are consistently far off from every other applicaiton outside of it.
If what you're saying here is that a fully color-managed application, like Photoshop, is delivering color that's different from non-color-managed applications, this is just what you should expect.
There is no such thing as system-wide color management.  It just doesn't work that way.  Individual applications do (or don't do, or even partially do) color-management.
This is key:
Color-managed applications perform transforms on the colors being displayed in pursuit of absolute color accuracy at the expense of consistency with non-color-managed applications.
Corrollary:
Some color-managed applications misinterpret some color profiles.  It happens.
Expanding on what Dag has said in post #1 above, no transform takes place if the document profile matches the display profile.
So... IF you're working with documents in the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color space (aka just "sRGB" for the purpose of this discussion) and IF you want the display of these images to match as often as possible between color-managed applciations and non-color-managed applications, this is one possible direction you can take:
1.  Set your system to associate the system-provided sRGB profile with your monitor(s). This is done via OS configuration dialogs.
2.  Set your monitor(s) to as closely match the sRGB color space as possible.  Some monitors were manufactured to be close, and others have the ability to be set that way.  Still others can't be directly set that way, but the system response can be tweaked with the basic controls (brightness, contrast, saturation, etc., as well as the curves adjustments in the video card drivers).
When the above conditions are met, you will see the following results:
A.  sRGB image documents, which are the majority of those published online and are usually the default output from digital cameras, will appear consistently the same in color-managed (Photoshop) and non-color-managed applications.  Depending on your needs you can configure Photoshop to work in the sRGB color space for creating your own images (this is actually Photoshop's default).
B.  In Photoshop and other color-managed apps you will get good overall color-management of image documents in other color spaces, though you'll see just the out-of-gamut colors (i.e., those colors from a larger color space that just can't be displayed in the sRGB color space) as fully-saturated and thus somewhat inaccurate.  In practice, most colors in most images fall within the sRGB gamut.
C. You'll see accurate color management by the partially* color-managed Internet Explorer 9, within the constraints of item B above.
D.  Since the sRGB color profile that comes with every Windows system is well formed, and is the default, there is a near zero chance that a color-managed application will misinterpret it and produce screwy color.  Such misinterpretation DOES happen with other profiles, a surprising number of times, even sometimes with profiles generated by good quality color measurement and profiling devices.  Color profiles are not trivial, and some software simply can't use some profiles.
The real (non-trivial) trick in this strategy is actually getting your monitor to closely match the sRGB color space without using a monitor profile.  However, it IS possible to get it close, and for many people "close enough" + "consistent across more apps" is better than "perfectly accurate in Photoshop but mismatching other apps".  It can even be checked with a profiling device to help with the fine tuning.
-Noel
*IE9 interprets your document color profile and always transforms it into the sRGB color space, regardless of your monitor profile.  Thus the only way to make the colors come out right is to have the monitor actually BE sRGB.  So far, unfortunately, it appears IE10 in Windows 8 is following this same "half baked" strategy.