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

[Lundberg02]

Do you understand that a wider gamut is always better?
Look in a mirror. There you are, in the widest possible gamut.
Go get a decent reference book and stop this nonsense.

[Guest]

Wide gamut is the cat's pyjamas, but that doesn't apply to what's currently being discussed. I'm specifically trying to confirm that an accurately calibrated wide-gamut monitor MAY still display a significant colour shift in SFW as a result of the difference between the monitor's (accurate) profile and sRGB. It's my position that it's not always the result of a "bad" profile.

If you're interested in commenting, please reread posts #460, #465 and #470 and provide your feedback to those comments. Thanks.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

There is absolutely no way of predicting what an untagged file will look like on any non-color-managed application regardless of the monitor.

If you thing a better monitor with a wider monitor will aggravate the problem, you are wrong.

[Guest]

You are misunderstanding me. I'm not trying to predict what an untagged file will look like on color-managed application regardless of the monitor. I am not saying that a wider gamut monitor showing a colour shift in SFW is a necessarily a problem.

The point I'm trying to make is that a colour shift in SFW may be the result of the difference between sRGB and a monitor's profile, and that does not necessarily mean that the profile is "bad" as I've heard suggested many times. A "bad" profile might be the cause, but not always. For example, if a user chooses Adobe RGB as the profile for an Apple Cinema Display, that is a "bad" profile for that monitor since it cannot display the full gamut of Adobe RGB. A properly calibrated Apple Cinema Display is VERY unlikely to use a profile near Adobe RGB.

However, wide gamut monitors properly calibrated may use a profile that is quite different from sRGB, and that would result in a significant shift in SFW. I believe this is the case for both Peter and I and our Dell 2407WFP-HC monitors. The answer in this case is not that our profiles are "bad". The answer is that the shift SHOULD be taking place and is not a Photoshop error. It's not a "problem". We should still be converting our web-bound images to sRGB and we should not be alarmed by the colour shift nor by their appearance in our non-colour managed browsers.

Please inform me if I am mistaken in any specific regard. Thanks.

[_Mike_Ornellas_]

And then there is the issue of the image being assigned one thing and ACTUALLY being in a different color space - but all we can do is guess at to what the image should look like. Photoshop displays the image accurately based upon a linear working space regardless of your monitor profile. The problem is that your monitor profile is what is in question. Assuming that your working space is what the image is.

The lack of the correct profile for the image you are looking at is the confusing issue.

Realistically. This is so screwed up in implementation that it really does not matter.

Go about your business as usual and swim in it until Adobe gets a clue on how to implement it properly.

[Guest]

>And then there is the issue of the image being assigned one thing and ACTUALLY being in a different color space. ... The lack of the correct profile for the image you are looking at is the confusing issue.

I think we've got that part by now. Lobbying for colour-management in web browsers is a separate issue.

>Go about your business as usual and swim in it until Adobe gets a clue on how to implement it properly.

Are you saying there IS a problem with SFW Mike? I'm sorry I don't think your comment was very clear. I've explained as clearly as I can manage, and several times over, why I think that there's nothing wrong with SFW and that there are situations when a colour shift in SFW should not be alarming...and yes, should be ignored. Can you respond in a specific way to things that I have said?

[_Mike_Ornellas_]

In remedial terms - it's the worst thing to be able to convert an image in SFW and then discard the profile. Yes - SFW has MANY problems. This is the biggest mistake anyone can make.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

> You are misunderstanding me.

Gee, what a surprise!

> I am not saying that

At this point what you are trying to say is beside the point, frankly.

> a wider gamut monitor showing a colour shift in SFW is a necessarily a problem. [sic]

That is horse manure. Why do you keep talking about a color "shift"???

There will be either some color clipping (with Relative Colorimettic rendering intent) or color compression (Perceptual rendering intent) when converting from a wide color space like ProPhoto RGB or Adobe RGB to a narrow one like sRGB. Clipping and compression are different phenomena from "color shift".

It's more likely that any perceived difference is being induced by a sloppy workflow, particularly one involving different gamma settings.

>The point I'm trying to make is that a colour shift in SFW may be the result of the difference between sRGB and a monitor's profile

The monitor profile is not involved in the color space conversion AT ALL. It will only be used by Photoshop to send the colors to the monitor for you to view.

If you have a crappy monitor profile, you will be seeing crap on your screen. It's that simple.

Put another way, if you see "significant color shifts", then you either don't know what you are doing at all, or your monitor profile is hosed, or. more likely, a combination of both.

Conversing with you is like trying to talk to a brick wall. :/

Any further exchange is futile until you learn the basics. You want us to teach you the basics, and that far exceeds the scope of what can be achieved on a public forum. You need to hit the books and to complete the tutorials and exercises you can find in the books and on the net by googling.

[Guest]

I am trying very hard to be clear in my communication, but over and over again I am being misunderstood. We both feel like we're talking to a brick wall. I will try one step at a time with bite-sized pieces, and hope that I can get my point across.

If a monitor is capable of displaying Adobe RGB gamut (for example), then after it is accurately calibrated, the resulting monitor profile should be closer to Adobe RGB than sRGB.

Am I right so far?

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

Raven,

What you are saying has no meaning.

> "If a monitor is capable of displaying Adobe RGB gamut (for example), then after it is accurately calibrated, the resulting monitor profile should be closer to Adobe RGB than sRGB.
>
>Am I right so far?"

No. You are comparing apples to bananas not even to oranges.

Please educate yourself to the point where you understand the difference between a device-dependent profile and a device-independent color space. Your monitor's profile is just that, a profile NOT a color space. It consists of curves that compensate for the monitor's response characteristics.

Until that is clear in your head, please refrain from discussing the issue further.

For a moment, please pick up my analogy of color profiles as tags indicating in what language a given text is. See my post #387 in this thread:

To understand profiles, think of your image as text, and of the profile as a tag that indicates what language the text is in.

If you see text that says GIFT, you need to know whether it's in English or in German. If in German, the word means "poison", if in English, it means a present.

Other examples: ONCE means "eleven" in Spanish but "one time" in English.

MOST means "Bridge" in Russian but "greatest in amount, extent, or degree" in English and "fruit juice" in German.

If you change the language (profile) by ASSIGNING, you change the meaning of the text (appearance of the image). The numbers representing the colors in your image will remain the same, but the colors will change because the same numbers now mean something else (as the meaning of the text will change if you now read the same letters in a different language).

CONVERTING to a profile will preserve the colors while the numbers change, in the same manner as the text will retain its meaning if you TRANSLATE it into a different language, changing the letters but preserving the meaning.

If you don't tag an image file, it's bound to be misinterpreted. Period.

What you now propose to say is like saying that if you translate a Russian text into German, it will be closer to English because the son of a gun who is reading the text speaks only French. That makes no sense at all and it has nothing to do with anything.

If a color space is like a language (German, Russian, French, Spanish) then a monitor profile is no more than the command of any one of those languages possessed by the s.o.b. reading the text, the degree of knowledge and ability to use that language by the s.o.b. If said s.o.b. has a great command of any of those languages, then some text written in one of those languages will be perfectly understood by him.

Now think of ACE (Adobe Color Engine) using your monitor profile as the Rosetta stone or universal interpreter/translator which will serve the text information to the s.o.b. (the monitor). If done properly, the s.o.b. will then be able to parse the text.

Photoshop is that polyglot translator.

When you convert an image to sRGB through ACE, the result is always the same REGARDLESS of the monitor and REGARDLESS of the monitor profile you use. The pixels will be the same in each case.

The only thing that may change noticeably with a wider gamut monitor is the quality in which you can see THE ORIGINAL image in its original color space BEFORE being converted to sRGB. If all the colors in the image are within the gamut of the narrower sRGB space, the converted image will be the same REGARDLESS of the monitor and REGARDLESS of the monitor profile you use.

If you're still confused, please forget everything I ever posted here. I will not reply any further. Good bye.

[Guest]

You still are not understanding what I am saying. I understand much more of what you are saying that you give me credit for. I do appreciate the effort you are making to try to explain your point, since some others don't bother, they simply put me down. You are at least trying to explain AND putting me down.

Lets take an image in Photoshop using sRGB as the working space, and fill it with R255 B0 G0. That's the brightest red that sRGB can represent. If I ASSIGN the Adobe RGB profile, that brightest red is now brighter, whether or not a monitor can display that colour. If a monitor is CAPABLE of displaying the full Adobe RGB gamut, I will SEE the red get brighter.

So here I am, looking at my sRGB red image in the nice colour-managed environment of Photoshop. It is not the brightest red the wide gamut monitor can produce, it's merely sRGB's brightest red. Photoshop, armed with data from the calibrated monitor profile, is smart enough to say "whoa now, let's have this monitor tone it down a bit so it shows the proper red colour." Now I go to SFW. The SFW preview window is NOT colour managed. It is sending a value of R255 B0 G0 to the graphics card without any ICC profile information. In effect it is ASSIGNING the monitor's profile to the image, since it doesn't know any better. The graphics card displays the brightest red it can since it doesn't know any better. That brightest red is brighter than the colour-managed sRGB brightest red, thus the SFW preview looks different than the Photoshop image itself. And it should look different.

Of course if I embed the sRGB profile in the image and view it in Safari, it will display the correct slightly less bright red, since Safari is colour managed and knows the characteristics of the monitor. But Firefox will show the same too-bright red as SFW. This is not due to a bad profile, nor is SFW broken.

I can't think of any other ways to phrase what I'm trying to say to you. I don't intend to frustrate you, I'm doing my honest best to communicate. If you will not reply anymore, perhaps someone else will.

[Guest]

For what it's worth I think your language analogy is excellent. To borrow from it:

Most monitors display a gamut similar to sRGB. Say the sRGB colour space is American English and most monitors speak British English. It's gonna be pretty close...just a couple of minor differences. Color vs. colour, tire vs. tyre etc. Now these wide gamut monitors come along speaking Spanish, and that causes some confusion.

Photoshop, as you've said, is an able translator. Within its colour managed environment, it will translate the English data into the wide-gamut monitor's native Spanish. But the SFW window, previewing what things look like without a translator, doesn't display the image in the intended language.

If these last couple of posts don't make any sense to you, I'll probably give up too. Best of luck.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

I did not completely read your last two posts, Raven. You're still totally wrong.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

>Lets take an image in Photoshop using sRGB as the working space, and fill it with R255 B0 G0. If I ASSIGN the Adobe RGB profile, that brightest red is now brighter, whether or not a monitor can display that colour.

Only an idiot would ASSIGN a different profile to an image created in a known different color space.

You have a present and you're falsely telling the software it's poison. Or you have a bridge and you're falsely telling the software it's fruit juice.

Of course that's crap! But it doesn't have anything to do with the command of any given language (the analogy for the monitor gamut), and it has everything to do with an idiotic conversion (translation) because the key reference has been withheld by some jackass.

It's bad enough to be a moron who sends out untagged files, but to ASSIGN the wrong profile on purpose crosses the boundary into absolute imbecility.

Stop right there. Cease and desist. Any further "analogy" you want to develop is sheer nonsense.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

The one valid language analogy is one that postulates that you have an utterly incompetent, drunken interpreter/translator (the equivalent of a crappy monitor profile) that is delivering the wrong information during the translation.

If you have an accurately calibrated and profiled monitor (a competent and sober translator), and if you know how to handle your colors through the use of Proof View and Gamut Warning, any monitor's wider gamut should have absolutely no effect on the final image. Zilch.

If your workflow is well managed, the final sRGB image will be the same from a wide-gamut monitor and from an sRGB monitor. The pixels will be the same.

Now, if you don't know how to work in a narrow color space like sRGB with an accurately calibrated and profiled wide-gamut Adobe RGB monitor, then you need to go to school and learn how to use Photoshop.

Which is what I keep telling you to do.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

>Within its colour managed environment, it will translate the English data into the wide-gamut monitor's native Spanish.

The monitor does NOT speak a language! It is NOT a color space. It displays the colors the monitor profile tells him to display. That's all. It has this vast collection of color tiles it uses as instructed by the monitor profile.

Crappy monitor profile = crappy color tiles. Drunken, incompetent translator.

[PeterK__]

>I did not completely read your last two posts, Raven. You're still totally wrong.

You're missing what Raven is getting at. The example Raven wrote is correct. If you take an untagged image that used to be sRGB, and view it on a wider-gamut monitor in a non-colour-managed app, that image's colours will take on the characteristic of the wide-gamut display, as if the monitor's profile was assigned to the image.

[Guest]

I'm extremely grateful Peter that you get what I'm saying. Ramon, you keep pointing me back to proper colour managed workflow. That all goes out the door as soon as the SFW preview window or Firefox or ANY non-colour managed environment enters the picture. If I had a crappy monitor profile, I'd be seeing crappy colours within the colour managed environment of Photoshop. I'm talking specifically about the SFW window, that's it and that's all. That's what this thread is about. I never send untagged images anywhere, except for web-bound images, because at this point in time the number of people using colour managed browsers AND calibrated monitors is too small for me to justify the added file sizes. Actually, I'll probably start including tags from now on for larger photos (but not buttons and stuff) just for the benefit of those precious few people.

Yes of course it doesn't make sense to assign Adobe RGB to an sRGB image, and I'm not recommending it. I use that merely as an example to illustrate my specific point.

Maybe the analogy could be improved...yes I understand that a monitor doesn't have a native language...I could say instead that Adobe RGB includes the trilled R sound that is part of the Spanish language, and sRGB doesn't. So a monitor is like a stereo speaker...it doesn't know what a language is, but it can produce sounds. A wide gamut monitor might be able to produce that trilled R sound while a standard monitor can't. Doesn't mean the monitor is Spanish, just that it's capable of producing Spanish sounds.

[Guest]

Raven,

I'm having subtle color issues between my Samsung CRT and my 20" iMac both calibrated by i1 Display. The sRGB water/rock image I posted in this thread looks slightly different color managed or not where the rocks viewed on the CRT look slightly yellowish but look a bit brighter and bluer/pinkish on the iMac.

Both displays show identical color temp and neutrality. I even visually adjusted the CRT's white point bluer to match the iMac which i1 Match software reads at 6300K and it didn't change the slightly bluer/pinkish appearance in the rocks. The iMac has a slightly wider gamut mainly in the blues than the CRT's with both being pretty close to sRGB.

[Guest]

Sorry Tim, I don't think I can help you. My guess is that either the calibration isn't accurate enough on the monitors, or that differences between the two monitors are too great to overcome.

[Guest]

Raven,

You are correct. All this technology isn't perfect. If you knew exactly what it takes to make this stuff work as good as it does under the hood you'ld think these programmers and computer hardware manufacturers were gods.

They make magicians seem boring and contrived.

[Lundberg02]

Gee, looky here, now Raven's the expert!
These forums are miraculous.

[_Mike_Ornellas_]

I want to be a pop tart for Christmas.

[Ramón_G_Castañeda]

Raven,
>Ramon, you keep pointing me back to proper colour managed workflow.

Duh!

[Guest]

>That all goes out the door as soon as the SFW preview window or Firefox or ANY non-colour managed environment enters the picture.

You must have missed this part.