Hi Guys - My apologies, as well. I've been dealing with a pinhole leak in a pipe above the kitchen and haven't had much time to devote to this thread since we got back from the shore.
thebestcpu - Thank you again, John. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your participation here on PSG. It's absolutely wonderful to know that there is one other person active on PSG who is competent (actually, much more than just competent
) in the area of color management.
puppychew - A few things.
1. You asked which working color space we thought you should use. John replied:
You can chose the Working Space as you desire. If the image has an embedded profile, with the settings you have the image will stay in the embedded profile color space. You can refer to by previous post for the pros and cons of various color spaces to help you choose a space. ..
While that statement is correct, let me elaborate a bit on the choice. Personally, I recommend that newbies to color management stick with sRGB. The reason is that if you use any of the other common working color spaces, if you want to ensure the widest compatibility with other folk, you must perform a final conversion to sRGB before you post any images on the web, or even if you submit your image to most of the consumer-level on-line printing services. If you don't do this, your colors and tones will look (or print) bizarrely. I can't tell you how many times we have fielded desperate pleas from people who forget to do this and can't figure out why people are telling them their images don't look good. Everyone forgets. I've done it myself enough times. The benefit one gets from using, say, ProFoto, can be substantial, but only if several conditions are met. Accordingly, I strongly recommend that if you are just getting your feet wet in the area of color management, you stick with sRGB for a year or two before switching to one of the wider gamut working spaces. As the old sayings go, you have to walk before you can run, and until you become much more familiar with the procedures, the downside risk of using one of these spaces (ie, your images occasionally look awful to others) is much more important than the slight improvement in colors you are likely to experience.
2. The advice given to you by John w.r.t. setting up and using Firefox as a golden standard for checking the consistency of sRGB images for color is right on the mark, but don't forget that Chrome can also be used as yet another image viewer that is properly color managed, at least for images containing (or tagged as) an sRGB color profile.
3. When attempting to to tell whether colors match or not by eye, a real image with skin tones and other familiar colored objects (eg, apples, etc.) is often much easier to use than a color chart. Accordingly, for your tests to verify that the colors you see in PS are the same as the colors you see in other color managed applications, I have attached a test image that I like that has some of these familiar colors. It is both tagged as sRGB, as well as contains a full, embedded sRGB numerical profile.
4. Keep in mind the "big picture" that I laid out way back in Post #26:
With respect to your system and this one image that you have been working on, here's my suggestion:
1. Delete photoshop's preference file, as suggested earlier. There may be other parameters in addition to the 20% saturation setting that have become corrupt, either by you setting them, or completely inadvertently, and non-volitionally. If you want to make some changes in the photoshop setup preferences, and you think there is any chance they might affect either colors or tonalities (ie, brightness, contrast, etc.), ask us first before you change them.
2. Once you've got PS running again with default parameters, run a hardware calibration on your system.
3. Take a set of sRGB JPGs and compare how they look in the 3 file viewers to how they look in PS. If they agree, great - you are almost done - just let us know. If they don't agree with each other, also let us know.
4. With your system now calibrated and 4 software packages all agree with each other, go back and make the house image the way you want using Photoshop.
5. (I think) You're done!!!
So, it sounds like you now almost at the point of being able say that the image looks the same in multiple, color-managed viewers, and will finally be able to make some final tweaks to the house image that you can trust, and so, be done with #4 and $5!
Enjoy!
Tom M