Photoshop Print Screen/Paste colors not working any more

Question

System. Windows 7 Professional 64 bit with Adobe CS4
One thing I do all the time is this:
Have something like Windows Internet Explorer open on a web page.
I want a screen shot of Windows IE. So I press Ctrl-Alt-Print Screen.
Then I open Adobe Photoshop CS4 (11.0.2) and go File/New and accept all the defaults.
Then I press Ctrl-V to paste in the screen capture.
Pretty standard stuff and it used to work fine. But recently it stopped working. Now when I paste, the colors displayed in Photoshop for the screen capture are all off. However if I save the file as a GIF or something, and open the GIF outside of photoshop, it's all good.
I've tried all sorts of things to fix this. Nothing seems to work.
Anyone know what is really going on here? This seems to have happened after performing some Windows updates.

Answer 1

gdkjunk912 wrote:
So how do I set up a "good custom monitor profile"?
This is why people calibrate and profile their monitors. If you had a calibrator this wouldn't be a problem (and they're not that expensive).
What you need is a profile that accurately describes the behavior of your particular monitor. Chances are the Dell profile does that better than sRGB, and a custom profile from a calibrator would be even better. Then Photoshop, which is color managed, will use that profile to display the image - but Internet Explorer, which is not (or not fully) color managed, will not use the profile.
So there will be a difference between the two right there, and Photoshop will be right, and IE wrong.
The way this works is similar to any other profile conversion, like when you convert a document from, say, Adobe RGB to sRGB. Photoshop converts from the document profile to the monitor profile, on the fly, as it displays the image. This way it compensates for the peculiarities of your monitor and what you see is what the file "really" looks like.
So you can see what happens if your document profile is sRGB, and your monitor profile is sRGB: nothing happens. No profile conversion, no color management. This way Photoshop behaves exactly as Internet Explorer does. Everything you see on-screen, color managed or not color managed, will match. But it won't be right. One way to simulate this (with a good monitor profile) is to proof to Monitor RGB.
As for the screenshot: when you paste that into a new document, the RGB numbers will refer to the monitor profile, not the document profile. This is why you assign the monitor profile to make it look like the original. Then you convert that to sRGB (or Adobe RGB etc) to bring it into a standard color space.