Consistent RGB Color Values with Photoshop CS4: An Impossibility??

Question

What I want is very simple: I want the Photoshop files I am working on and the rendered PNGs in my browser to have the same color values. I don't care if my web images look the same color on other screens or anything like that. All I want is for the screenshots of PNGs my web browser to match the color values I have used in Photoshop. I've had it up to here with color shiftsthis did not used to be an issue in CS3.
Moreover, if I save a file on my Mac, and a color value is, say, #cf4640, I want someone who opens the file on a Windows box to get the same color value for that pixel. Ditto for the images I have saved for the webI want the RGB values to be consistent. This does not seem like too much to ask, does it?
Right now, I have turned all color management policies set to Off, working spaces are all set to Generics, and documents are set to "Don't Color Manage"my Windows colleagues also have these same settings. This used to work as expected in CS3we all got the same color values on the same files, and colors didn't shift when viewed in a browser.
Once again, I don't care if the colors *look* the same from platform to platform or screen to screen. I just want consistent RGB values.
Color management has never caused me anything but headachesleave my colors alone, Photoshop! I really really wish there was a "Work Like Photoshop 4" setting for color management.
Does anyone have any ideas how I might solve my problems?
Thanks very much.
Oh, and, incidentally, I was originally thinking of calling Adobe about this; how foolish of me. I looked into it, and can I just say how fantastic it is that you have to pay extra money for actual first-party tech support on a $700 piece of software?

Answer 1

The sounds/language analogy isn't really relevant to this problem, because it suggests transforming between two entirely different media. One medium: the medium of sound information, to another entirely different medium: the medium of thoughts and meanings. That's something that simply can't be done without an intermediate translation. That's not the case with color transforms in the RGB space, where it's just a matter of taking RGB values and pushing them through a matrix to produce other RGB values. That's the process that messes everyone up and creates all the confusing color output, and frankly it's an unnecessary process. Your assertion that the values in a source image have no meaning without an associated profile isn't entirely true. What if those source values were simply pushed directly though to the display? After all, a display simply renders 8 bits of R, 8 bits of G, and 8 bits of B for each pixel.
I think the original poster has some very valid concerns. Sometimes we just want to set some color values, and know that everybody's display, on every platform, will render those color values the same way. As he said, they may not look identical to the eye, but the values going through that DVI cable will be setting that pixel to the same 24-bit value no matter what. That's how things would be if there were no such thing as color management. That's how things used to be long ago, and in many ways the world of color was far more predictable and less confusing back then.
Here's my vision for a perfect world: color management doesn't exist in the RGB space. None. No such thing. Source RGB values in images get pushed right through to the display. The onus is on the display manufacturers to produce hardware that renders those values as consistently as possible. In the world of print, sure- color management is incredibly useful. But if only we could go back in time and keep color profiles out of our RGB, I believe we'd be much better off today.