Major colour shift when opening/saving/printing in Photoshop

[Stingey]

HI all, I'm new here and would like some advice.

I've been an employed graphic designer for 7 years and have started doing freelance from home. I have the same mac and software at work as at home and never encountered this problem before.

I've just done a flyer job for someone and one of the images I used, which was purchased from shutterstock, displayed awfully when I viewed it in Photoshop - it shifted to a more oversaturated look and very red. I assumed something had happened to my monitor and thought it would not print like this. I changed to CMYK for print and it made it look slightly worse. Stupidly and naively I still thought it would print fine as i'd never encountered this before and as I hadn't tampered with the colours myself - it still should print as intended.

Anyway it printed awfully too! I was wondering if anyone knew what was causing the problem. Attached is an image comparison. You will know instantly which is the problematic image and what it should look like.

Thanks in advance.

Stingey

 

[dv8_fx]

Hi there.

I don't use a mac so might be wrong on this...

As you say you've never experienced this, this particular shuttercock image might have been saved in a different profile color setting than what you're PS is set to. Did you retain, discard or have PS reset it to your PS profile?

Just a shot in the dark......

 

[Tom Mann]

dv8_fx's hypothesis is right on the mark. In fact, if you assign the LH image to a ProPhoto color profile (see attached below), you can see that the new colors match up almost perfectly with the incorrect version that you posted on the right.

Without knowing exactly what happened to this image, and without having a link to the original version on Shutterstock (to check its color profile), it's impossible to say where the error crept in.

However, to expand on dv8's hypothesis, if the Shutterstock image was in sRGB (as many (most?) are), and you have your working color space set to be ProPhoto, AND you selected "do not color manage" when you ingested that image, all the RGB numbers in the file would be interpreted as if they were in the ProPhoto color space instead of the correct sRGB space. This is equivalent to what I did, which was to use the "assign profile" command with the target profile set to ProPhoto.

HTH,

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

BTW, don't pay any attention to the fact that the version I posted isn't quite as sharp as the version you posted. This is because the image you uploaded was 1643 x 765 pixels whereas the version I uploaded was only 698 x 325 pixels. The size of your upload triggered the forum uploading software to generate a preview that would display in-line which tends to be a bit sharper than what I like.

Also, the color of the man in my version (ie, on the LHS) is very close, but not exactly the same as the color of the man in yours. This could be due to many things -- I just wanted to illustrate a very likely cause, not try to guess at every single thing that happened to this image.

T

 

[dv8_fx]

It was a shot in dark... lol

I don't usually have problems with Shutterstock images From what I recall, the images are in Adobe RGB (1998) not sRGB . Either your (OP's) working space setting is different or this image was saved with a different profile.

 

[Tom Mann]

If the original was in Adobe RGB and not the sRGB that I guessed, and the target color space was ProFoto, that would account almost perfectly for the slight color difference between the man in the LH and RH sides of the image I posted. Thanks for that info.

T

 

[dv8_fx]

Hmmm ... I've never used Profoto.... must try it out oneday.

Thanks Tom.

 

[Tom Mann]

I use ProFoto (@16 bits per ch) A LOT. It holds color fidelity in the brightest and darkest areas much better than any of the smaller gamut spaces. It also shows less posterization in these areas. Theoretically, it does have slightly more posterization in the mid tones than smaller gamut spaces, but at 16 bpc, this is a completely moot point.

For the above reasons, Adobe selected a slight variant of ProFoto to be the native / internal color space that LR operates in and intentionally did not provide for any means for the end user to change this. Obviously, with LR, you can ingest and export images in any color space, but they thought that the benefits of doing all the processing in this space were so great that they settled on this for their LR product.

For images shot in controlled environments, specifically, with well controlled contrast (eg, studio portraits), you'll be hard pressed to tell the difference between this and sRGB, LOL. The same goes for any image that don't need major tweaking, but for images shot in the wild, eg, event photography, high contrast landscapes, wildly saturated colors, etc., it's really nice. It also removes some of the need to shoot multiple exposures to make an HDR blend.

Give it a try. If you do this sort of work, I think you'll like it.

Cheers,

T

 

[dv8_fx]

I'm curious to find out if its suitable for layout graphics, cover designs or architectural perspective renders which I specialize in work.

 

[Tom Mann]

I don't work in any of those areas, but I suspect that ProFoto won't be all that useful to you. It's most useful when one has to make radical changes to the extreme darkest and lightest areas in an image, particularly when you are trying to recover detail from those areas from a ultra high contrast RAW image taken with essentially uncontrolled lighting.

I suspect that in your line of work, since you can pretty much set the tonality as you wish, you would design the image right from the start not to have such extremes.

Once you take away that advantage, then the only big advantage left is the possibility that the large gamut of ProFoto might give you a wider range of colors when printing. However, the gamut when printing is almost always bottlenecked by the printer, and I suspect that something like Adobe RGB would be quite adequate, even with 6 (or more) ink printers.

That being said, I don't have personal experience in your field, so I would love to hear your thoughts on it after you try it for a month or two.

Cheers,

Tom