I am going insane in my attempt to keep consistent color management through all areas. Everything was fine, color was great, prints were matched to calbration, monitor calibrated, and then....I rebooted the computer since I hadn't done so for a week, and when I restarted Bridge, and Lightroom (yields same results), the color immediately drains from the photos. Similar to the screenshot, however when I initially created this screenshot, Bridge was still accepting the color. Now, the desaturation exists in all Adobe programs. (PS CS5, camera raw, bridge , lightroom 3. I feel like I'm going in circles here. I have no clue what could have changed with the reboot. One thing I have noticed is that in Window before a photo image is generated in a folder is shows as a paint pallette. And, when asked in Windows Color Management of the program I would like to use to install a profile, I am give Microsoft Color Management System (which to my understanding is designed for Vista or XP). Tried to delete the program but was denied. Not sure if that has anything to do with it either.
If you have any insight and can help me stop the madness I would be so greatly appreciative!!
Thanks! 
Windows7
U2410 Dell Ultra Sharp Monitor
Photoshop CS5 64-bit
Adobe Lightroom 3
Camera RAW
Adobe Bridge
NIVIDIA FX 580
117
Replies
Johnnysks76,
I hate to hear that you've also encountered this relentless issue. In my last post to this thread, I felt that I had at least ruled out several possible causes and had the system producing valid color across all programs. This unfortunately, only lasted for about one week and once again everything had reverted back to the dull, desaturated colors in all color managed software, in all file formats (nef, jpeg, psd, etc...). Valid color representation only existed in non-color managed spaces (Windows7, IE7, IE8). This of course is completely useless since all editing takes place in color managed software.
You mention that your problem seemed to be eliveated with Spyder3. Unfortunately for me, this was not the case. I did upgrade to Spyder3 Elite, with the assumption that Spyder2 was the culprit for all my troubles. Not the case, in fact, I beleive that one of the only ways that the system is once again displaying valid color is because I removed the Spyder3 program.
What led me to this is that I had purchased out of desperation, the macbook Pro and was using the laptop with the Dell monitor ((U2410). Everything was working perfectly with just using the mac color sync profile and using Standard preset on the Dell front panel controls. I edited for two days without issue and decided to go ahead and calibrate the monitor with the Spyder3. HUGE mistake! I was right back where I began. So, I uninstalled the profile, the software etc.. The problem persisted. Then I realized that for some reason, the profile was not deleting. I deleted it several times, and even applyed the "secure empty". The profile could not be found anywhere in a search. However, as I was in the color profiles of the macbook there was a feature that I hadn't had the luxury of on my PC. As I scrolled through the different color profiles on the mac it not only revealed the name of each profile, but the graph as well. BINGO!!! I arrived at the profile listed as wide gammut and the size/shape of the wide gammut profile was as we would typically see them. However, there was the obvious, plain as the nose on your face, lack of saturation and color. There were no reds in this profile, only oranges. There was no brightness of any kind. Just a washed out wide graph of grungy color. Somehow, the calibrated color profile was not deleteing and was attaching itself within the color profiles of the mac. The srgb, and all the other profiles were as they should be. The other BIG element that I noticed is that no matter which profile I chose, I would end up with the wide gamut profile, EVEN when it clearly stated that I was in another.. I don't know if I would have ever known this had I not been using the macbook pro.
I cannot recall exactly how I finally discovered and deleted this "parasite profile" (my term), but once I did, everything was back to normal again.
In saying all this though, I decided to once again give my PC a try (this was 2 weeks later) because the mac just does not have the power or the efficiency that my PC has. Everything was working fine, everything loaded fine, I did not reinstall the Spyder3 and made sure that everything Spyder related was gone from the system (as well as I could anyway). For about 4 days I was fine, then out of nowhere again..... It was back! I did note that there were two things had occurred just prior to the revert.
One, there was a Windows automatic update the evening before, which included a re-start.
Two, I had loaded some photos into Lightroom 3.(whatever it is now)
I deleted the Windows update completely, and deleted any images that had been loaded into Lightroom.
Neither deletion on it's own seemed to remedy the issue. I don't know if its possible that the "parasite profile" is still lingering somewhere on the PC and I am unable to see it (as PC does now show the color graph images for the profiles), or if this is just another part of the mystery that remains.
As I type this, I am using the Dell U2410. I resorted to using the old CRT first, and it worked. After a few days I hooked the Dell monitor up once again, and so far (knock on wood) so good, BUT only using my eye judgement as the calibrator. Brightness is at 0 and Contrast 40 and still too bright. Color however is, as close as I think possible to valid, and now set to Adobe RGB.
Hopefully, someday, someone a lot smarter than myself will find the culprit and solution to this. For me, it's more difficult to narrow down the real culprit since everything on my PC is new (custom built in Sept). The monitor, Adobe CS5, Lightroom (which I had never used prior to my new build), Spyder3, etc...were all put into use at the same time.
The only thing I know is that this has devastated my business and my professional reputation. A true nightmare!!
**Yes, I did update the Spyder3 (4 point something or other) as soon as I installed it..
Message was edited by: conniez68
Connie,
In Windows 7, could post screenshots of the 3 tabs of your Color Managment dialog box?
Perhaps with the drop down of all device profiles showing such as below? I know you probaly can't get all of them showing at one time, but perhaps your monitor related profiles are grouped together.
Forgive me if you've already been through this exercise, but it's really not obvious how this is set up in Windows 7. And it's apparently not at all obvious how Adobe is using whatever color profiles are available either. I'm hoping I can learn a bit more from your ordeal so I don't repeat it.
Johnny,
Keep us posted on anything you find. I suggest reading through the reviews at http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/ (both the wide gamut monitors as well as the calibration tools) if you haven't already. Their info is why I plan to go with the Lacie solution.
"gator soup",
How about giving the "convert to sRGB" mantra a rest? Johnny is obviously already fully up to speed there and I'll bet money that Connie is as well.
Thank you for the input, folks. I think Connie is right, and I suspect it has to do with Spyder's profiling and how Windows 7 is loading the profile. I'm going to do more testing, and I'll post back if I find anything.
What I am very confused about is this: Using spyder3's profile and their loader, I get consistently greenish colour across both color space aware and unaware application (think the Matrix's green tinge). Using the shipped Dell profile and Window 7's profile loader, I get greenish colour in application that supports sRGB, and "proper" (or what my expectations are) in anything that doesn't read sRGB. I am incline to think it is not just the profile, but also how they're loaded by OS and the applicaitons. I'm going to try to find other loaders to see if I can find consistencies using Dell's ship profile.
Connie, if you are finding issues with Spyder profiles loading when they're not suppose to, have you consider deleting them completely? Windows keep them in the following directory:
c:/windows/system32/spool/drivers/color
Colorvision's profile would probably be in a file name spyder3express.icm (or in your case spyder3elite.icm) or something along those line. I imagine deleting the actual file would be a sure fire way of preventing Windows or another application from reloading an undesirable profile? Or, if you're hesitant about deleting profiles, you can always rename them from spyder3express.icm to spyder3express.icm.old so that windows cannot load it (as in affect, they can't find the file). It's an old technician's trick. 
Gator, I appreciate your input, but as stated I have been using sRGB profile from capture to Bridge to CS4 for a few years now, so in this case it is unrelated to not using sRGB. If you have any other ideas, I would welcome them and hopefully help us to find a solution.
Johnny,
Deleting the profiles from both locatios was the first step I tried way back. However, not until I used the Spyder3 on the macbook pro did I discover that even though I had manually deleted the profile from from the color profiles the profile persisted and generated itself within all profiles. This is where I was able to visually see the difference in color across the graphs. I had to go into every program, in every folder, in the registry and in Windows and manually delete anything and everything in regards to Spyder, as well as any Dell color profile. Knock on wood, the PC is producing as close to valid as I am going to get without calibration. I do not dare touch anything now for fear of the issue returning. It has been about 2 weeks since everything was deleted. This had been the longest span without an incident since it showed its ugly face on Octeber 27th. I have not, and will not dare open Lightroom either until I have completed all of my sittings. I have 8 to go, crossing my fingers!
Chris,
I'm happy to post these screenshots. However, I'm not sure they will be of much use since at the moment the issue is not present. I do have a few that were taken in the midst of the issue that were posted here I believe. If not, let me know and I'll repost those as well.
I am also posting a couple shots of the on screen front panel of the Dell, showing my current settings. (Excuse the poor image quality. Shot with my cell)
****OOps forgot this and I'm sure it important as this was the final step that seemed to alleviate the issue. I completely disable Windows color management.
Message was edited by: conniez68
Connie,
Indeed there was information earlier in the thread about your color management settings, including in your original post. (At this point one problem is there's reams of info in this thread.) One thing I quickly noted is that you've gone from "Relative Colorimetric" rendering to "Perceptual". Do you know if this change made any substantial difference?
I also note that on the Advanced tab you're using "WCS profile for sRGB viewing conditions" instead of "WCS profile for ICC viewing conditions". This is one I'm in the dark on but my instinct was that with any custom calibration the ICC choice would be the way to go. Now that you've thrown in another curve ball with turning off the Windows Color System service I'm not sure this even matters at all. 
Have you received any knowledgeable help on this setting that panned out?
Also, if you're sticking with sRGB why not have your Dell's mode set to sRGB instead of Adobe RGB? Did I see that right in the picture above? (I'm trying to go Adobe RGB all the way through except when I share images with others for use on other PCs, so I'm using the U3011's Adobe RGB mode.)
this is a pretty old discussion but it was probably the only resource i found that actually helped with my colour management nightmare!
i spent weeks and wasted tons of ink and expensive photo paper and seemingly to no avail. all i wanted to do was to stop me and my wife looking sunburnt in my print outs from adobe photoshop. I even bought a new printer before i realised the fault lay elsewhere.
I have a dell u2410, on win 6 x64. I used lightroom 3.3 x64, photoshop cs5 32 and 64 bit and a host of other colour managed programs and others that were not.
what i realise now (thanks to the previous posts) was that when i opened my images in photoshop they were desaturating. This meant i over compensated in the adjustments and hence when i printed all the colours were terribly oversaturated. What i couldnt work out was that in windows 7 thumbnails and preview, i.e. not colour managed all the colours looked pretty much like the prints. But open photoshop and they were as i wanted them, neutral skin tones.
i checked and checked again that i was letting photoshop handle the colour management for prints and am 100% certain had the settings correct.
i went down the route of various ICC profiles and luckily did not invest in a calibrating device for my monitor.
to cut a long story short I found that the problem was with the ATI software and specifically the display color options (via DVI) - the color temperature control!! This was set to use EDID when unticked i found that when i opened photoshop my colours no longer desaturated!!! Woo hooo.
and the other thing was definitely disable the windows color system service mentioned in a previous post - although it sounds like it shouldnt make a difference it definitely does.
So now I had what I expected, colours look a bit naff in non colour managed software but "fairly" closely resemble what i see in photoshop, and now when i print to my canon mg5250 (using photoshop colour man) my prints "nearly" match what i see in photoshop!!
Perhaps I would now benefit from true calibration and creation of a custom icc profile but i am pretty happy with the results.
hopefully this will help anyone else in this situation
Ok, I found a pretty good work around based on these two thread.
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=861984&page=2
The op claims that the Spyder3 are clipping the green and generating bad profiles that cause oversaturated green's, and he suggested using collected profiles that others generated using Lacie Blue Eye pro per the below link:
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/icc_profiles.htm
I tried their sRGB profile using Window 7's profile loader, with my U2711 set to sRGB, both Bridge and PS set to North American General purpose 2 (aka sRGB work space), both the raw and jpeg does have sRGB profile (screenshot included for jpeg) contrast 50, brightness 20 (around 130 measure brightness, I forgot what the unit was), and after Bridge loads the profile the "shift" is much more subtle, and not very much green shifted. Here is another comparision, using Irfanview with colour management turned off and then on (and reloaded), and it seems pretty usable to me.
For prosterity, here is the screenshot confirming sRGB profile was indeed embedded into jpeg.
To me the problem is clear. The profiles from Spyder3 of the U2711 causes greens to be oversaturated. The shipped Dell profiles was not a good match (thus I saw a large discrepency between managed applications's display of image such as Bridge/PS/Irfanview vs IE8/Windows), and the LaCie's profile are a pretty close match, which is the solution I am include to stick with for now.
Lastly, let me assure you what I saw in Irfanview with color management turned on did match what I saw in Bridge/PS using North America General 2 in case there are any doubts about Irfanview's validity. If there are any differences, they're beyond what my human eyes can precieve, as well as any potential clients of mine.
In the vast land of Windows colour management and wide gamut monitor spaces, are there no space for the high road? If there is no space for the high road, then surely there is no space on a support forum for ethuggary either.
Connie was right about narrowing it down to the spyder profiles, Chris was right about the Lacie Blue Eye, and I help to tied it together with other info in regards to Dell 2410/2711's wide gamut and the spyder's inability to calibrate it properly. Problem solved. I hope no one else has to be frustarted by this as Connie, countless others and I have. You'd be surprise by how many others I have found in various forums with the same undiagnosed problem who was told by others to just live with it. I hope they find this thread and can revolve their problem and get on with what they need to do. I myself have 18 weddings to finish!
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