Photoshop CS3 color management "Save for Web" problem

[_Peter_Mars_]

This problem is getting the best of me.......

After spending 3 full days researching this problem, I am no closer to finding an answer than when I started. I still cannot produce a usable image through the "Save for Web" feature of Photoshop CS3. I have read web page after web page of "Tips, Tricks and Recommendations" from dozens of experts, some from this forum, and still I have no solution... I am exhausted and frustrated to say the least. Here's the simple facts that I know at this point.

I have a web design project that was started in PS CS1. All artwork was created in photoshop and exported to JPG format by using "Save for Web". Every image displays correctly in these browsers (Safari, Camino, FireFox and even Internet Explorer on a PC).

I have recently upgraded to PS CS3 and now cannot get any newly JPG'd image to display correctly. My original settings in CS1 were of no concern to me at the time, because it always just worked, and so I do not know what they were. I have opened a few of my previous images in CS3 and found that sRGB-2.1 displays them more or less accurately. I am using sRGB 2.1 working space. Upon openning these previous image files, I get the "Missing Profile" message and of course I select "Leave as is. Do Not color manage". CS3 assumes sRGB-2.1 working space, opens the file, and all is well.

The problem is when I go to "Save for Web", the saturation goes up, and the colors change. The opposite of what most people are reporting. Here's another important point... new artwork created in CS3 does exactly the same thing, so it's not because of the older CS1 files.

I have tried every combination of "uncompensated color", "Convert to sRGB", "ICC Profile", etc. while saving. I have Converted to sRGB before saving, and my monitor is calibrated correctly.
I have tried setting the "Save for Web" page on 2-up and the "original" on the left is already color shifted before I even hit the "Save" button. Of course, the "Optimized" image on the right looks perfect because I am cheating by selecting the "Use Document Color Profile" item. Why do they even have this feature if doesn't work, or misleads you?

Does anyone have any ideas what could be happening here? Why is this all so screwed up?
CS1 worked fine out of the box.

Final note: I do have an image file I could send along that demonstrates how it is possible to display an image exactly the same in all 4 of the browsers I mentioned with no color differences. It is untagged RGB and somehow it just works.

I am very frustrated with all of this and any suggestions will be appreciated

Thanks,
Pete

[_Peter_Mars_]

pfigen at keyway dot net

[Guest]

Peter F... Please post the profile thing in this thread so we can all see...

[_Peter_Figen_]

Here ya go...it's a bit of a pain in the ass to get representative views that show everything in one still image. When you are viewing the maps, you can scroll and see them from any angle, side or top to bottom, as well as adjust the wireframe opacities and colors to suit, but this should give you the basic idea. This Dell is not quite Adobe RGB, but it's much much larger than sRGB. A picture is worth 400 messages.

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1TuavVHZtb0coWT6ALWkb7zKE2CNBM0

[_Peter_Mars_]

Interesting... thanks very much. My eyes have not been deceiving me after all. I still have no idea what this means, other than no one else can view anything I create in quite the same way. I suppose this doesn't change anything, I still need a more mainstream compatible monitor. Thanks again for doing this.

[Guest]

mmh, I didn't think this thread would go on. You miss a lot when you leave to run errands. <br /> <br />I didn't think I'ld see Dell displays with such a large gamut. It doesn't really do you much good viewing web color since the size and shape of the gamut kind of puts you in color limbo between sRGB and not quite AdobeRGB. <br /> <br />I don't suppose reducing the saturation and adjusting the hue OSD sliders if any exist got you closer to sRGB. <br /> <br />Dirk, <br /> <br />I nolonger reside in Kerrville. Just moved two months ago to New Braunfels, Texas, the place I've been wanting to live since I saw Landa Park in my early '20's around 1980. The park has the most crystal clear bluegreen spring water rivers coming straight out of the rocks and river banks. <br /> <br />Been to Fredericksburg, nice sleepy little town just like Kerrville, but with more upscale professional types. Haven't yet made my rounds viewing the hill country sites yet which there are many. <br /> <br />Check out why I moved from this shot of one of several Landa park streams I took on my Pentax K100D with some editing in PS. <br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1QRSEUGyGoArs2BxDCvSozkQzM1pL3" /></a> <img alt="Picture hosted by Pixentral" src="http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1QRSEUGyGoArs2BxDCvSozkQzM1pL3_thumb.jpg" border="0" />

[_Peter_Mars_]

Ya, weird to say the least... it is a very colorful and bright monitor. I have tweaked the OSD RGB sliders and that's the profile I get. It is even more colorful with R-G-B all set to 100%

If only browsers assumed sRGB instead of MonitorRGB... who's idea was that anyway?

[Guest]

Peter,

The sRGB tagged image I posted do the rocks look pinkish and/or oversaturated including the water or is it natural looking?

What happens when you turn down the brightness of the display the same level as a sheet of white paper viewed under your current lighting arrangement? What kind of calibration results do you get then?

It sounds like you might have an S-PVA panel. I've read comments how vivid Samsung brands of LCD TV's and computer displays are from other users. And everybody just loves the way they look.

[_Peter_Figen_]

I think that soon most browsers will read embedded profiles. Maybe if they are profile savvy you could also designate assumed profiles.

[_Peter_Mars_]

Tim: I would say everything looks natural... good color, not oversaturated. Rocks look tan, dirt looks slightly warm, similar to rocks but darker, not grey or neutral.

Lowering the brightness causes trouble at this point. B=25 and C=85. In my case, Brightness is really black level and contrast is max white if you will. I have tried all of this and these are the most accurate settings. Lowering contrast (white point) doesn't help with saturation shift using SFW.

I read that if my serial number ends in an "S" it means Samsung... it does. That's all I know.
Color is great, I love it.

Peter F: Progress is inevitable... as always. I'm just tired of wrestling with this. I just do not to wake up tomorrow and find that the world has changed to this new standard and I've just returned a good monitor I got for a super price. I still can't get over that it's so close to aRGB!

Thanks again for your input.... love your photography website by the way! Classy and cool shots!

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

Peter Figen and Dirk: <br /> <br /> Don't lose sight of the fact that what appears labeled as "Dell gamut" on the graph posted at Pixentral is only the profile created by Peter Mars for his Dell Monitor with the Huey, and is not to be taken as the gamut of the Dell monitor per se. <br /> <br />c <a href="http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1TuavVHZtb0coWT6ALWkb7zKE2CNBM0" /></a> <img alt="Picture hosted by Pixentral" src="http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1TuavVHZtb0coWT6ALWkb7zKE2CNBM0_thumb.jpg" border="0" /> <br />c Click on thumbnail to see full image again <br /> <br /> I suppose I could create a spurious profile that far exceeded ProPhoto RGB and pass it off as my monitor profile, which would be absurd. In other words, one has to take into account both the tolerances and accuracy of the Huey as well as possible human error.

[Lundberg02]

Good point, Ramon.
If Dell has managed to get that close to Adobe RGB without using LEDs I'd like to know how they did it. Fluorescent backlight has a very weird red component( as do CRTs) that everyone has learned to live with up til now. LED backlight has much better color spectra. I suppose it's possible that Dell has modified the fluorescent somehow, but I still doubt it. Maybe they have improved their RGB filters in some way. I personally have liked the Dells ever since they started branding somebody's panels as their own.

[Guest]

Ramon, do you have any suggestions on how to create a profile for these Dells that is is colour accurate, targeted to 2.2 gamma and 6500K AND is closer to sRGB?

[_Peter_Mars_]

Here's a marketing quote from back in June.... "Dell today released the UltraSharp 2407WFP-HC, a new wide color gamut version of the 2407WFP LCD display. The new Dell 2407WFP-HC uses "wide CCFL" technology to provide a wider color gamut.

The firm claims the new 2407WFP-HC can display 92% of the NTSC color gamut, most LCD displays can only show 40 to 70 percent"

Make your own decision, I have been working with this monitor for 3 months now and I believe it... everything posted here points to this, and I for one find no other possible explanation. I have repeatedly stated that the colors are amazing and way too much to handle. The point to all this is that the monitor is so far from normal as to make it not suited for some photo processing operations... by todays standards anyway. Images look normal in color, but without tweaking this monitor is beyond bright and vivid! It may be good for many things, but certainly not sRGB web design.

During this whole process of discovery, I have also discussed the results and limitations of the HueyPro with a color scientist at Pantone/x-rite and received, at no charge, a completely new version of the HueyPro that they claim has improved contrast handling ability, specifically designed for "certain" wide-gamut monitors. I believe verything is fine with the calibrtion and profiling.

Id keep it if I could afford 2 monitors..... I will gladly accept donations towards this end, thanks.

"Life is what happens while you're making other plans" - John Lennon

[Guest]

Peter Mars,

Hang on a second. You said that image I posted looks natural? How can that be since it's sRGB? It's suppose to look overly saturated in nonCM browsers.

View the image both to compare in PS honoring the tagged sRGB profile and in your nonCM browser. They should look different much the same according to what you've indicated with your own images.

If they don't you have a bad monitor profile or your system is referencing the wrong profile PS uses to give correct looking CM previews causing you to edit the saturation levels inaccurately. It's happened before even on Windows systems. Something doesn't get written in the write place or clicking doesn't make things stick or something happens at start up to cause things not to load correctly.

[Guest]

And I just remembered. There's a way to know for sure what panel you have with the Dell at least it worked on the 2007wfp.

You may have to get the instructions to access the ROM for the model you have, but the way it worked on the 2007wfp was to turn the display off with the front button and turn it on again while holding down the OSD menu button for about 3 seconds or until the screen is nolonger black and the first color appears and then let go and then hit the + or - button. Do a search on the web. That's how I found these instructions.

This will access the ROM section of the display at the level the factory used to set up all default settings like hue, saturation and a myriad of other complicated parameters. When this menu appears at the top it should read LG or Samsung and such and such model number.

[_Peter_Mars_]

Tim: I'm using Safari... I'll check Firefox and PS... OK, well it looks the same in FF, but I will say that there is definitely less saturation in Photoshop, the pond photo has no embedded profile, so I assigned sRGB 2.1 upon opening... no pinkish or any color stands out over any other. It does look more natural in PS. Great in fact.

Not sure how to check for the profile issue... it has been very consistent right from the beginning.

Don't forget, and I have posted this before, I do see the same type of saturation shift with my G4 and Sony CRT but no where near as severe and barely noticable, it is a saturation increase non the less. Both running PS CS3

[_Peter_Mars_]

It's a Samsung s-pva panel
Here's a quote from ZDnet:

For what it's worth...

"The sixth "HC" revision increases the image quality once more by bringing High Colour to the table, meaning the screen is capable of displaying 92 percent of the NTSC colour gamut, compared to the 72-76 percent of old. For the non colour geeks out there, this means that a lot of colours that were being "lost" on older monitors -- that is, being displayed inaccurately -- can now be seen on screen. This should please everyday users and amateur photographers alike, although colour professionals will probably still keep a properly calibrated CRT somewhere for safety."

[Guest]

Peter,

Then if the images look different between the two then it's the gamut difference issue and not a system level problem. That's good.

Nice to know they're making great improvements in LCD displays. We can always use more color. Now all the more reason to use color management even with the web.

[_Peter_Figen_]

This entire thread seems to have perfectly illustrated the theory of unintended consequences. On the one hand, larger monitor gamuts certainly do seem like a good thing, but there is a lot of catching up to do in other areas. Similar things happened to applications like Quark Xpress when we shifted from calibrating to gamma 2.2 from 1.8. The non color managed interface of the earlier versions got too dark and contrasty. There are other problems with high gamut displays in critical graphic use that have not been talked about here. The data path is currently 8 bit through the entire path, and with large gamut displays, combined with the tweaking of the video lookup tables in the graphics card to carry out the monitor calibration, on screen banding can be a real problem, especially in subtle gradients. For the type of work that I do, dealing with on screen artifacts and banding that are not actually in the file, but only a product of the monitor itself, are completely unacceptable. Hopefully, all the issues will be dealt with by the time my three Sony Artisans finally wear out.

[_Peter_Mars_]

Ya great... so I'm returning a high color monitor because photoshop is unable to provide a solution for browsers that are unable to deal with this. My frustration is that there is no other solution, but there should be! Things change, things progress forward, people will always holler and scream about it. The world is round I tell you!

The good news tho is that only people with this monitor or similar, will have trouble viewing untagged sRGB images on the internet.

I wonder if Adobe could add this button to photoshop (see image below)

http://www.hostzombie.com/cs3/button.jpg

[large image replaced with its link]

[Guest]

I agree Peter, I am seeing a lot of banding in gradients, eg. a very noticeable jump in colour at the border of colours differing by one single RGB number. (This is probably not just because there's a larger difference between R154 and R155 in a wider gamut, but due to inferiorities in the monitor and/or profile.) Perhaps in future monitors will have 16-bit display, and someone will offer system-wide colour management options with more customization.

I am considering emailing Dell to see what they have to say about my desire to have this monitor operate closer to sRGB. Unless someone here knows of a way to do that. To my still relatively naive mind, it doesn't seem like it shouldn't be so difficult -- seems like it should be a part of the calibration process.

There are still gaps in my understanding and I have more to learn, but I have learned a ton in this sprawling mega-post.

[Guest]

Peter M., I hear what you're saying although I'm not sure that it's a Photoshop issue. Colour managed images display correctly, whether in Photoshop or in Safari...it seems that methods of dealing with un-tagged or non CM images are lacking. My two cents.

[Guest]

To go one step further in defense of Photoshop...when I select my calibrated profile before closing the Display Preferences window - Photoshop displays an oversaturated image. Once I close the Display Preferences window (committing to the monitor profile), the image desaturates to a more normal appearance, suggesting that Photoshop is recognizing that the gamut is "too wide" and compensates for that to display "correctly". Same with colour-managed Safari.

I don't know if I'm quite right there, but it's making sense to me right now.

[_g_ballard_]

>> I'm returning a high color monitor because photoshop is unable to provide a solution for browsers that are unable to deal with this.

hmm...

[_Peter_Mars_]

Well thanks for the help, I don't know what else to do then. I will return the monitor and move on. Maybe one day I will re purchase a full spectrum monitor (or whatever you call it).

I just think PS should offer some kind of solution or help, maybe a warning message, or a special calibration button or whatever.