tif vs png

[MarieMeyer]

I was having a problem today with a photo changing colors between PS and AI. I have their color management settings synced. Thru trial and error, I found that saving it as a tif instead of a png solved the problem. A bit of Googling suggested that profiles are not supported in pngs in Adobe applications. Is this true? If so - why?

[Test Screen Name]

I have seen it said that Photoshop "Export" and "Save for Web" don't save profiles in PNG, while "Save as" does. Sometimes people use Save for Web or Export when not intending (only) web use, and this causes problems. The function name "Export" is especially unhelpful, because it gives no clue of its limitations.

[MarieMeyer]

Ah. That is exactly what I have been doing - using Export.

[D Fosse]

To be precise: Export and Save For Web do correctly embed profiles in PNG. The problem is that they don't do it by default. You have to check the box.

PNGs have a different problem with "Save As". There you can't embed the profile at all, no matter what you do - if that profile happens to be sRGB. Which of course it always is with PNGs. Any other profile can be embedded with no problem. Go figure.

[NB, colourmanagement]

Yes that’s pretty messed up, someone should post a bug report please

here:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/categories/photoshop_family_photoshop

I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net :: adobe forum volunteer
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management
[please only use the blue reply button at the top of the page, this maintains the original thread title and chronological order of posts]

[Test Screen Name]

By the way, if going from PS to AI, while it might seem obvious to save a PNG or TIFF or JPEG, consider just placing the PSD.

[MarieMeyer]

I export the image so that I can crop it to the size I want it in Illustrator and also because I assume it keeps the Illustrator file smaller. Is that daft?

[Test Screen Name]

No, those are good reasons. But it might, for now, solve your colour issues. Or it might not. It could be interesting to find out, it might inform the original problem.

[Ton Frederiks]

In Illustrator PNGs and profiles are a mess.

It does not read nor write profiles when importing or exporting (save for web is the exception and can convert to sRGB).

If your Illustrator document has Adobe RGB as the document profile and you export as PNG, the rgb numbers will be exported, but the profile is not saved.

If you open the resulting PNG in Photoshop, Photoshop wrongly assumes sRGB, you need to assign the Adobe RGB profile to get the correct colors.

If you place a PNG in Illustrator it assumes that it has the current document color profile and ignores an embedded profile.

Unless you only work with sRGB files, PNG is the wrong file format to use in Illustrator.