Images look dark and faded

Soon I am selling my 7 month old iBook so I can get the new MacBook pro... I erased everything in the disk.. and I reset everything. Next step are the updates. After almost a whole day making updates (atleast waiting fo them to download), now my computer (especially iPhoto) suffers from discolored images. Icons seem to be inmune to it... but for example Messenger For Mac icons and display pictures are also discolored.
*Update: seems the problem comes spontaneous. I realized that it may come from the new Messenger for Mac which brings the option to " Let others see what I'm listening too". This option automatically displays the song i am listening too in itunes in my display name. Each time i put a song on itunes means that the next time I open iPhoto the images wll look faded.

sounds like you have Prophoto in the soup (and some color management issues, tagged vs untagged, color-managed vs not color-managed viewers)...

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Photoshop cs6 images look dark and green when put into dropbox.

I have just upgraded to PS CS6 and my images are looking dark and green when I upload them into dropbox to send to clients for review.
A screenshot of my image looks perfect in dropbox but if I save it directly it looks terrible.

sounds like you have Prophoto in the soup (and some color management issues, tagged vs untagged, color-managed vs not color-managed viewers)...

When converted to RGB, image looks darker??

in photoshop CS4, I use Adobe RGB (1998) as my working profile. I open a document, I change it's profile from RGB, using "view"-"mode", to anything else, say Lab, and everything is fine up to now, but then I undo the change, and what I get is a darker image than before. I don't get the original image I opened. Same thing happens if I use the "convert to profile" option also.
I close the image and reopen it, it still looks darker. I restart photoshop and open the image, only then I get the original image with normal colors again. This happens only when I convert back to RGB, not from RGB and not between any other profiles.
So basically when I, at some point, change the color profile from RGB to any other profile and then back to RGB the image looks darker, and the only way to fix this is restarting photoshop. this didn't happen in any versions before cs4, what should I do? thanks.

thanks very much for your response. Actually I had the latest drivers and photoshop 11.0.1, then I downgraded my drivers and this solved the issue.
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When importing rendered clips from davinci into premiere they look darker and more contrasty.

After importing the graded and rendered clips from davinci into premiere pro cc they look darker and more contrasty. I've checked the exported files from DaVinci and they look totally fine if you play them with any media player, but when I import them in Premiere Pro CC, they appear darker and way more contrasty than I've graded them in Resolve. Anyone have a solution for that?
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This is a long-standing and complicated issue. To start with, different media players interpret footage differently. You can hope for the best, but there can be no expectation that footage in one player will look the same in another. Ridiculous, but true. The situation is further aggravated by different display cards and different monitors, and no prevailing standards of how color and levels are interpreted.
In your specific case, you need to look at the waveforms, in Resolve and in PPro. It sounds as if the blacks are being crushed in PPro, which could mean you're monitoring them at 64 in Resolve, but they're being output at 0 or remapped to 0 in PP. This may also relate to whether you've monitoring with data or video levels in Resolve.
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Images look darker outside of photoshop?

I got a new computer last month long ago and installed cs4. Everything works fine, everything looks fine. But then if I save my image to a jpg and view it outside of Photoshop, it looks so dark! I re-open that same file back into Photoshop and it looks fine again.
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This means you need to calibrate your monitor to get a good profile.
Photoshop is colour managed, which means it uses the profile where non-colour managed applications don't.
Have a look at this: http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/index.html
Adobe Gamma is no longer bundled with Photoshop but You can try QuickGamma: http://www.quickgamma.de/indexen.html
In the long run, it pays to get a hardware calibration device such a the Eye-One Display.

Images become dark and saturated Photoshop JPEG

So I have noticed several people having this problem, and the solutions that work for them don't seem to work for me!
I start in Camera Raw 8.0, then move to photoshop to crop and tweak a little bit more, then when I save to JPEG and view in windows photo viewer or other medium, the photo is dark and overly saturated. I understand that photoshop is a color mangaged space, and that most other programs are not, but I still can't figure out how to make what I see in photoshop translate to the JPEG image. These will eventually be used on a website and I need everything to look as professional as possible. The image on the right is really dark, especially on the front lawn and porch.
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I suspect that when you're seeing your images not looking right you're viewing them through an incorrectly or incompletely color-managed combination of software and settings. Note that Internet Explorer, while it does read image color profiles, can ONLY show you proper color if your monitors are set to display the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color space accurately. It makes the (incorrect) assumption that all monitors are sRGB. I believe Windows Photo Viewer only does proper color-management if set to display in a window, not full-screen.
If you're wanting to publish on the web, one generally accepted "least of evils" method is to publish the images with a profile and in the sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color space. At least that way people with "standard gamut" monitors will see them with similar to accurate colors, and folks with properly color-managed setups will see them accurately. Firefox and Safari do NOT assume your monitor is sRGB, and both use the image and monitor color-profiles during image display.
In the bottom-center of Camera Raw is what looks like a link for setting workflow options. If you click it, it will allow you to set Camera Raw to open your images into any of several profiles. As I recall, the out-of-box default is Adobe RGB. You *could* consider converting your images to the sRGB color space directly, then whenever you save them they'll be in the color-space that's more likely to be seen properly. Or you could open them into a wider gamut color space (as they are by default), then Convert them (your last dialog above) to the sRGB color space before saving as JPEG (or use the Save For Web function to do that conversion while creating the JPEG).
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James Bechdel wrote:
I think I solved it. Every place I could change to Adobe RGB I did
Er...I don't really think that solves anything. But you may succeed in temporarily hiding the problem.
You do have PS color management policies at "preserve embedded profiles", right? As long as you do, there's no particular need to synchronize PS / ACR / Lr color settings, any source profile should be honored anywhere.
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Thanks for your response.
Finally, I just created a new project, then copied and pasted all the assets and elements into that new file -- along with the still photo. Everything looks great in the new project. Very hard to figure. I must've hit some button, or changed some setting in the original project that I was unaware of.
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Thank you for the reply, Ed. I've delved into the PS preferences as best I could but did not see anything related to this issue. I have ACR set to convert at 240 dpi with ProPhoto color space and have never encountered this problem under typical 16 bit conversions from RAW to psd. For some reason PS sets the document size of 32 bit images to 3.5' x 5' @ 72 dpi which results in an extra step to the already time consuming workflow when creating such images in PS.
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Hello,
I've just upgraded to CS3 (windows Vista) and I'm having the same problem. Images are dark adn have an almost brownish tone to them. I tried "leave as is" "assign RGB" and all the options under "Assign profile" and nothing helped.
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Images look dark and faded

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