Colors in Photoshop look different elsewhere

When I open a picture in Photoshop CS3 or Camera RAW for editing and then save that picture, and then open the saved picture in any program other than Photoshop, the colors and tints and saturation are very different. I am pretty sure this has to do with my color profile in Photoshop, but I've checked many online sources and my color settings seem to match up more or less with what's recommended. My camera is set to sRGB and Photoshop is set to sRGB IEC61966-2.1, and this is happening both with JPEGs and RAWs, from two different Canon cameras.
Pictures look more natural when viewed in Photoshop than in other programs (I think), even before any editing...how could this be?
The weird things is, when I go to Edit > Assign Profile and then select "Lighthouse (D65 G2.2 A34.29)" from the drop-down menu, the image in Photoshop now looks exactly like it does when I open the same image in an image viewing program. What does this mean?
Also, when viewing my photos in Bridge CS3, the colors look like they do in Photoshop until I zoom in 100% and the photo finishes loading the actual pixels, at which point the colors dramatically change.
How can I edit pictures in Photoshop and Camera RAW when what I'm editing is not what's actually seen? This is very frustrating. Anybody have any ideas?

Thank you both for your replies. My monitor has been properly calibrated, but not for a long time. I know that this will not help when it comes to color representation, but this is not my problem. My problem is that the images in Photoshop look different than elsewhere. I am wondering if there is either a way to make Photoshop display the photos as they will appear on websites and such, or a way to save the photos as they actually appear in Photoshop.
I find it odd that I have not noticed this until recently. There is a very significant difference between the colors in the two environments. If the problem truly has rooted from an uncalibrated monitor, I will simply calibrate it (I would have already but I don't have a calibration device any more). But I don't think that's the whole problem here.

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Please re-ask your question in the Photoshop forum.
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Whenever I import color themes from Adobe Color CC, they look different in Illustrator. The cmyk values are the identical but the colors just aren't the same. I guess it has something to do with my color settings in Illustrator but I can't figure out what it is. Here are my color settings:
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Colors look different in browser window than in InDesign or Photoshop

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my Firefox browser window), than when I download or copy the CMYK
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Color balance looks different going from lightroom to photoshop which is correct?

color balance looks different going from lightroom to photoshop which is correct?

Besides calibrating you rmonitor:
Make sure that in PS you have selected ProPhoto RGB as Working Space.
Go > Edit > Color Settings.
LR uses ProPhoto RGB and tht cannot be changed. So you have to make sure that PS uses the same Working Space.
WW

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Thanks for the quick and helpful reply! I didn't know there was such a thing as a default display, but after setting that to the external the photos look good again.
I guess I wasn't using the right search terms, but after reading your reply I was able to find this huge thread:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1394928&start=0&tstart=0
It seems to me that this is an OS bug, because the images were displaying incorrectly in Preview, Safari, etc. Each display has been calibrated and has a ColorSync profile, and the OS knows which display the window is on, so it should be able to figure out which profile to use.

Color in photoshop different then in aperture

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I think using the previews (as in quick preview mode) yields results that lie. When making all adjustments, I'm looking at the RAW file.
I think some clarification is needed here for both of you to determine what is going on.
1. Quick Preview Mode uses a jpeg preview that is embedded by the camera within the raw file. It's not "lying". It's just giving you the camera's version of things. Just like Aperture, ACR, DPP, Nikon Capture NX each have different color engines and will give different renderings of the same raw file - the same is happening here. The color and tone of Aperture's Quick Preview Mode is not going to match Aperture's rendering, it will only match the rendering of the OEM software that came with your camera. Quick Preview mode is no different than using something like Photo Mechanic.
2. PSSSSS - your color should be matching between Aperture and a file exported into Photoshop but there are a many variables at play here and you need to pin them down to figure out what is going on.
-I assume you are working on a calibrated display (one calibrated with a hardware device like an Xrite Display or Eye-one or similar). That's the only way to know that what you are seeing is accurate in either program.
-For Aperture, make sure you are not in Quick Preview Mode and you do not have soft-proofing turned on.
-For Photoshop, make sure you do not have "Proof Setup" turned on and in your Color Settings make sure that it is set to "Preserve Embedded Profiles".
-With all three of the above done your color should match. If it does not there another possible issue I'm aware of and that is that Aperture is not compatible with certain kinds of display profiles. This goes back to 2006 and I don't know if it has been corrected. What I found then is that Aperture did not display images correctly if the display/monitor profile uses a "Large (LUT)" setting.
Here's a thread going over that issue:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=469271&tstart=0
I think certain screen calibration pucks like the Huey do use the "Large (LUT)" setting but do not let you know that or give you any other options.
-One last possible issue, PSSSSS, is that your post lists a MacBook Pro as your computer. Are you using an external display? If not there could be an issue in MBP screen and/or its profile. How so? I've found that MBP screen, while the best to date, is still wanting. It can show images as noisy when they are not and it can show images as slightly posterized when they are not. I don't know if this affect is across the board or only within certain programs. For example, when I shoot tethered, my Canon 1DsM3 tethering to my MBP and using Canon's DPP software. The previews in the DPP can look noisy and a touch posterized, as I just mentioned, but the same files opened on my desktop Mac Pro/Apple Cinema Display look just fine.
-In this thread, http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7518140#7518140 , you mention "Show Master Image" or using the loupe shows a color shift in the image. I'm not seeing that at all on my system. If I remember correctly, this was part of the problem I saw when I found the display profile to be incompatible with Aperture (again, mentioned above).
Jon Roemer
http://www.jonroemer.com
http://jonroemer.typepad.com/

Photos look different in Photoshop than when viewed with Picture Viewer

I am running Windows XP, using Photoshop CS2, with a Samsung SyncMaster LCD monitor. I have recently noticed that my picures look different when viewing with Picture Viewer than when the same picture is opened in Photoshop. The photoshop version is much lighter while the pic viewer version is darker. I want to make sure of what I'm sending to my online printers. Do I have color setting wrong? My color setting in Photoshop are: sRGB IEC61966-2.1, U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2, Dot Gain 20%, and Dot Gain 20%. And preserved embedded profiles for RGB, CMYK, and Gray. Is the problem with calibrating my monitor, and if so, do you know of any free calibration software? I'm on a budget.
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Well, it surely is a problem with your monitor settings, but, forgive me for saying this, mentioning "sending stuff to the printers" and then asking for free calibration software is a bit naive. If Adobe Gamma, the settings in PS itself and the color calibration in Windows don't cut it, then your system is seriously bent in terms of color and some other steps are required first.
a) reset your monitor to its default color temperature and brightness
b) get rid of any color tweaking your graphics card may introduce
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Mylenium

2 files with exact the same PMS color look different

I was working on a print project for my company and all files are created in Illustrator CC. Here is the confusing part, in this logo color file I found from the company inside files, the PMS color code actually matches the CMYK color code, and they look exactly the same on screen:
But on all the files I'm working on, the PMS color looks washed, when using the convert button to convert PMS to CMYK, the code looks different too:
Is there a file color setting I need to change? Besides illustrator, the PMS color in Photoshop cc and InDesign cc all look wash out.

The Color Mode of the swatch only impacts how the the color appears on your monitor. The important thing is that the Color Type always be "Spot Color" regardless of the Color Mode when you're dealing with files for print. If it's set to Spot Color, then exporting the file to film will have a single color pass. If it's set to Process Color you'll get 1-4 color passes when exporting depending on your CMYK values.
For the company's branding guide, you have both color options depending on how the logo will be printed. If you had something that included a photo, then you would want to use the CMYK version of the logo because you're already going to have CMYK values from the photo. Using an additional spot color just for the logo then makes it a 5-color job, thus increasing the cost. If you were printing something that only used black for text and also included the logo, then you would use the PMS version as this makes it a 2-color print job.
In some circumstances you don't have an option of a CMYK break of a PMS color, such as metallics and fluorescents. Some companies only print their logo in a spot color despite having it as part of a 4-color print just due to how a CMYK version of their logo appears. Not every PMS color has a 100% accurate CMYK break. Most frequently the CMYK version is dull compared to the PMS color simply because the gamut for CMYK is not as diverse as the full range of PMS colors are.

Pdf color looks different in preview and acrobat?

I notice that the colors in various PDF files I have look different in Preview and in Acrobat. Is there some weird color profile issue?
To be specific, I can create a PDF file in various ways, of a slide deck I originally created using Keynote. It has various different color blocks in the slides. In particular some acid green colors look very different depending on whether I open the PDF in Acrobat or in Preview.
Preview shows the colors as they were in the original keynote application. But Acrobat shows them far more muted.
I learned from another post that if I create the PDF by first saving to postscript and then creating the PDF using Acrobat, the issue seems to go away. However this is very inconvenient.
In short, it seems as though there is some peculiar difference between the way Preview and Keynote (and probably Pages ) handle color and the way Acrobat handles color.
Is there some way to fix this using some setting in one of the programs?
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Same problem here. I was printing a PDF that my designer had sent me. Before I have always used Acrobat, but I've started using Preview in Leopard since it's faster and more powerful than before. But the colors were seriously wrong, often reversed completely. I believe this file was originally created in Illustrator.

Colors look different in titler than on timeline

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What is your Premiere Monitor Playback Res set at?
What is the Preview Setting?
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Bug? Corrupt Tones / Colours - Image looks different in photoshop

Hi,
Am hoping somebody can help me as I must be doing something really stupid here. I'm currently evaluating various workflow products, and really like Lightroom but find that whenever I import an image into LR the tones, particular shadow tones, look way too dark. They look kinda posterised.
My monitor is color calibrated with a spyder. I am running Windows XP.
I've attached a link to an image to demonstrate. I took an sRGB JPEG and imported into LR. I then edited a copy in PS (exported as ProPhoto - converted in PS to Adobe 1988 colorspace), another copy is shown exported to Capture NX (also Adobe colorspace).
http://www.hamiltonconsulting.net/strange%20tones.jpg
if you look at the shadow tones in the folds of the jacket you can see a minor difference between PS and Capture NX but you can see a clear difference in LR. The shadows are way darker.
The image opens fine it every other application I have tried, including the free XP viewers. LR is doing something strange to the file but I cant work out what.
I first noticed the problem occuring in Beta 4.1 and am now getting the same issue in the new Lightroom demo ( I had hoped it was a bug that would have been fixed). I have been installing all sorts of evaluation software of late, so maybe something hasnt been cleaned out of my registry, or something is clashing.
So far, I've tried lots of different images (all with the same problem). Recreating an image database. Reinstalling LR (countless times).
Does anyone have any ideas as to what I can try or do I need to reinstall my entire PC :-(

The image on the left in PS looks the same in Picasa Image
Viewer (I selected it to be color managed based on the monitor profile), looks the same in Windows Image Viewer, and looks the same in the thumbnail. The image on the right in LR is how the picture looks when I look at my image in Firefox but in Internet Explorer and in Chrome, the image looks like the image on the left in PS. The image below shows how the thumbnail looks different from the actual picture when it's double clicked and viewed in Picasa. The thumbnail (which shows the subjects having green skin) would be how I saw it online while the double clicked version is how I saw it in PS, even though it was sRGB (I checked the image properties to make sure of the color space).
I have a ATI 5470 GPU on my ASUS 17.3 inch laptop. Not sure about the drivers.

Split line/tone Pantone swatches of same color look different

QUESTION: In Illustrator I need to split a Pantone color into two different swatches (line and tone). When I duplicate the swatch and rename it with an "L" in front, the color looks different (with overprint preview)! Same CMYK values – I checked. I know it has something to do with how the swatch is named, because if I rename both swatches I don't have this problem. What's going on and how can I fix this?

John Danek wrote:
Not sure, but I would not recommend renaming Pantone Spot color swatches. What's the point? I mean, why would you mess with the names?
I think they wants to use one swatch for certain parts of elements like the stroke and and perhaps the other for fills but of different and not necessarily common paths.
Changing the name make it easier for them to know which is applied to the other. There coud be a reason to keep them separate and to have the names be different to make the work flow effiecient.
I think the reason is that since they are now two different swatches it treats it as two different inks one from the book and the other from a CMYK mix.
It simply does not recognize the second swatch as a book color which would have to be a second plate with the same ink.
You cannot rename a book color.
So unless you were planning to hit the piece with two plates with the same spot color what you want to do is not possible.
I can see where you want this but I see no way of fixing it except a feature request.
Perhaps placing the same swatch in two different color groups?

Colors in Photoshop look different elsewhere

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