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Color changes when saving from PSD to JPEG...

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
April 6, 2012
5 replies
89956 views

Hey all,

I've run into a problem that I'm sure has been a popular one for many. I recently edited a photo of mine in Photoshop CS5 and when I save it to JPEG format and open it, the color is completely different. I've searched the web and have tried some of the solutions that have seemed to have helped others but for me it hasn't worked such as using sRGB and changing the working spaces to adobe RGB (1998). Both of which hasn't worked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

How to

This topic has been closed for replies.

S

SGP_SGP

Participant

Hello Everyone, I am also quite new to Photoshop, (6 months) and I also ran into this problem, a problem that I usually "solve" by just printing my screen and reassembling the image in GIMP, which is a very laughable technique but gives me the results I want. (and yes its also incredibly hard and time taking for large pictures)

So I was wondering if anyone has come up with a solution? I really doubt it has anything to do with color management but rather, perhaps, Photoshop just being unable to deal with format conversion? I'm not sure.

For this particular problem I asked help to my teacher (I took a 4 month Adobe course) and not only he never noticed before, but he also couldn't solve it, not even on mac. I have been using GIMP for at least 10 years and it never had such an issue, so why does this only happens with photoshop?

In fact as I was typing this post, I tried saving a psd file and then open it on GIMP and the result was the same... is this more like a photoshop UI problem?

And yes, I have tried everything, setting color management to monitor; when saving, checking the sRGB thing; Getting rid of color management altogether; and nothing seems to work other than just taking screens of photoshop...

D Fosse

Community Expert

You have a defective/corrupt/broken monitor profile, which breaks the color management chain in Photoshop. Fix that and Photoshop will display correctly.

Applications without color management don't use the monitor profile and are not affected.

S

SGP_SGP

Participant

D Fosse wrote:
You have a defective/corrupt/broken monitor profile, which breaks the color management chain in Photoshop. Fix that and Photoshop will display correctly.
Applications without color management don't use the monitor profile and are not affected.

Actually, I Finally found an explanation to the problem and how to fix it.

The simplest solution to this problem seems to be to just Turn on View>Proof Setup> Monitor RGB and then also View> Proof Colors just BEFORE you start working so you work in whatever colors Photoshop will color change when you save, so when it saves you won't perceive a change. Unluckily this means that if you already touched the image or colors, you have to redo all your work or copy it to windows clipboard in order to preserve your colors outside of PS.

I don't know how PS works internally (I mean in detail), but it seems that everything has something to do with Proof Settings More than anything else. Photoshop seems to always start with a proof of Adobe RGB or similar, instead of your monitor, this tampers with the color values and can be easily proven by having several colors when PS starts, then taking a screen, then switching to Proof colors (preferably monitor rgb) then pasting, and you'll notice you'll have both sets of colors, the ones you thought to be working with and the ones PS will actually save your image with.

If you look closely at the pink and orange, the top view is how photoshop displays everything at startup, which is Adobe RGB I think, and then bellow is how everything looks when I save. (This whole image is inside the photoshop canvas.)

But then this makes me think that what others see will be the thing that PS shows you, but I don't know really. It could be the one from monitor. In the meantime I found The workaround.

I think it would be most advisable to first check that your monitor is correctly set with RGB proper and then compare the photoshop proof with monitor proof so that you don't get this problem anymore. There are a series of really complex perception illusions at play here.

I will go ahead an try to calibrate my monitor to what photoshop uses at startup and see what happens...

J

Justin Engelman

Participant

This is a few years old but I had the same problem and I found this solved it: go to 'Edit > Convert to Profile' and choose 'sRGB IEC61966-2.1' or perhaps whatever you have that starts with sRGB? After doing that when I save as JPG and open using the default Windows 10 photo viewer the color looked a lot better than before. There have been a number of responses here but what has not really been addressed is I want to make sure the image will look the same to other people on other computers in whatever web browser or photo viewer they are using, which we have no control over. And if I cannot get it to look the same (with the exception of perhaps monitor settings and/or ambient lighting conditions) on two separate applications on my own computer with the same monitor and ambient lighting how can I expect my clients will see what I am seeing?

D Fosse

Community Expert

Justin Engelman wrote:
what has not really been addressed is I want to make sure the image will look the same to other people on other computers

It has been addressed very effectively, and it's called color management. This is precisely what it was invented for.

Obviously, color management has to be there. Without it all bets are off and you have no control whatsoever.

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

Obviously, color management has to be there. Without it all bets are off and you have no control whatsoever.

And with mobile phones and tablets it is not there …

M

masterdrew

Participant

When saving i had this same issue.

for some reason when saving it would distort my colors like radial colors.

so i learned that the ICC profile pro photo was checked on. Uncheck it and see if that helps

D Fosse

Community Expert

Stripping the profile solves nothing, on the contrary.

Color management isn't difficult, it just has to be there. But in many applications it isn't, and then everything breaks down unless you take your precautions. Not using ProPhoto is one of them. Stick to sRGB.

First question to ask in color management troubleshooting: Is the application color managed at all? You'd be surprised how many aren't.

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

What are your Edit > Color Settings (screenshot please)?

If you embedded the profile with the jpg and Photoshop is set to Preserve Embedded Profiles the jps should look pretty much identical to the psd in Photoshop at View > Actual Pixels (save for the jpg-damage).

A

aaronavtrAuthor

Participating Frequently

My color settings are...

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

Couls you please post a screenshot of psd and jpg open side by side in Photoshop?

And could you please set them to display their Profiles?

Because quite frankly I’m having a hard time believing the described behaviour.

JJMack

Community Expert

No answer but a few questions. What color space was the image edited in? When you saved it as a Jpeg file did you save it with an embedded color profile? When you opened the jpeg images did you open it with a color manages program like Photoshop or a non color image viewer or non color managed web browser?

JJMack