Photoshop Windows/Mac Colour/Color Issues

Are you sure you're saving color profiles in your picture? That's an Adobe thing more than an OS X thing....

mkrishnan said:

Are you sure you're saving color profiles in your picture? That's an Adobe thing more than an OS X thing....

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More importantly, is the monitor on the PC you are opening them on calibrated for color? The most common problem when viewing images on different computers is color calibration, it doesn't matter at all if you save a file with your Adobe color space profiles if the files are opened on a different monitor with different calibration.

The only true way to get an accurate color read is to have a match print pulled from your local film output house and compare them to what is on your monitor and his.

Usually people only pull film if the files are going to press, otherwise a PDFX file is a good digital proof.

That's a good point...although, why do the images created on the PC look the same on the two computers? Because they were in sRGB?

Spanky Deluxe said:

His colour profiles are set to the default values. I really don't get it because images that I haven't edited look the same on both, its only my photoshopped images. It doesn't matter if I make them lighter or darker on my machine. It looks as if on his machine the images are opening up with a layer of translucent grey on them. I really don't get it. I've saved them as tiffs, pngs, jpegs, everything to no avail. Attatched colour profiles, changed colour profiles, nothing seems to make a difference.

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It's probably not a color calibration issue, are the files you are working on layered files?

Are you working in CMYK or RGB?

Are you both using the same version of Photoshop? If not, is it asking you to update layers when opened in the newer version of Photoshop?

Lots of questions come to mind and your problem could be any number of issues.

Spanky Deluxe said:

I'm working in RGB. Basically what I'm doing is taking various exposures of a shot and converting them into a natural looking image.

I used to do this by taking the best bits from each image manually and using layers to put it all together but I'm now trying to use the Merge HDR image tool and then downconverting to 16 and 8 bit colour depths.

I'm using Photoshop CS3 Mac and he's using Photoshop Elements PC.

My images don't have any layers whatsoever. I'm going to restart into Windows and see if my Windows version of CS2 behaves any better. I really don't get this at all!!

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1. Rip a jpeg of this file and post it.
2. What app are you doing the above merge HDR process in?
3. Why are you converting to 16 or 8 bit color, are your RAW tiffs in 32 bit to start with?
4. If you are opening a 16 bit color image in Elements, does PS Elements even support 16 bit color?

Spanky Deluxe said:

I'm using Photoshop to do the HDR merge, it creates 32 bit files which you then need to downsample to 8 bit or 16 bit color to be useful or to save as JPG formats. The raw images are 8 bit JPEGs at varying exposures. Elements doesn't support anything above 8 bit so I'm converting everything down anyway.
I just opened up the files on his computer and took a screenshot and am now looking at the screen shot side by side with the original images and the colours are different!! I'm running in Windows at the moment and once I work out a way to take a screenshot without having a Printscreen button I'll post it up.

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Of course the screenshot will display the image differently, a screenshot is a 72 dpi, low rez image whose color capture pickups are rudimentary at best. Taking a screenshot is not a good benchmark for any kind of color checking.

To put it simply every machine displays color differently because of a variety of reasons, it the difference between "displayed color" and "actual color".

Unless they are the exact same two monitors, with the exact same calibrated color monitor display settings, the exact same brightness settings and contrast settings, the exact same color temp settings, and the exact same color profiles in Photoshop with the same gamma, color tables, etc., the bottom line is they will display color DIFFERENTLY. They will also display your gamma (white point values, hence the grey, opaque quality) differently and your contrast differently.

The ONLY true way to tell is to pull a match print outputed to SWOP standards and compare them to the displayed image on BOTH monitors to see the difference in the way they both display the same color value. This will quickly tell show you how differently both two monitors display the same color.

Finally, just wait until you PRINT one of the images and it looks different than both the monitors and different than either machine! hahaha... Then you are opening a whole other can of worms and "printed color" comes into play.

True color calibration is an art and a science and makes the difference between good and bad looking print output, especially in photography. Make sense?

Spanky Deluxe said:

Here's a comparison shot. The image on the left is a screenshot from his machine in Photoshop Elements looking at the image. The image on the right is a screenshot from my machine in Photoshop CS2 for Windows looking at the very same image. They're different in colour!

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It's the difference in monitor displays,

One little thing that might help how it previews on the PC:

When you save a jpeg on your Mac, go to Save for Web>Save as Jpeg>Click on the little right arrow in the top right corner and select Standard Windows Color and then open the jpeg on the PC and see if it helps a little.

Short of going through ALL the calibration processes I detailed in my post above, the bottom line is that the two monitors will display the same file differently. From looking at your screenshots, the color is fine and the problem is the way it's being displayed from one monitor to the next.

Spanky Deluxe said:

Cool, thanks for the help, I'll spend some more time looking into it. If only computers could just send what it sees to the screen letting the screen make the choices of colour profiles.

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The problem is that their are so many standards and different types of hardware out there that getting them on the same page is almost impossible sometimes.

Color correction can be really a tricky thing and a major pain in the ass. The number one problem or issue with my clients in print design is the difference between how say a catalog page looks on their monitors and how the printed physical sample looks.

So what we do is send them film matchprints and make them sign off on those, then when the print samples arrive they are the same as the match print there are no surprises and we aren't responsible for the printing costs of 8,000,000 catalogs printed exactly the same as the matchprint.

We didn't even get into the weirdest part of color and that is the psychological aspects of color, two people looking at the same image will perceive or see that same color differently, for instance, the way I perceive blue is different than the person standing next to me, hahaha...They go bananas with that one.

Anyhow I hope some of this gives you an idea of the complexity of color calibration and correction.

From looking at your image the color looked fine, nice and bright and seemed to pop like it should. You can count on the printed image or web image to look better than your display or screenshot too so don't get too worried because the preview on your friends monitor looks funky or grey. Most basic color tables in Photoshop and OSX do a good job of basic color management.

Oh and send the check for my color management tech support to...hahaha

Spanky Deluxe said:

Hahaha!!! It'll be in the post like err.... you know...

Cheers for all the help, its greatly appreciated! I know what you mean about the stress of colour in print. Luckily I don't do much of that anymore, its all digital format only. The number of times I've had to explain to people that you just can't print that particular blue colour that your eyes can't focus on... dear God!! "But it looks like that on the screen, why doesn't it look anything like that on paper". ~cries~

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haha...You know exactly what I'm talking about then! Drives them nuts and it's difficult to explain the science behind it as well.

No problem on the help, if you have any other questions just ask, that's what this forum is for. The diplayed color thing drove ME bananas when I first got into the design industry and took trial and error to get the whole digital production output process right.

Color management is a difficult task. I have been reading Real World: Color Management to gain better grasp for working on managing and understanding how colors on screen and on paper work. This topic is deep.

highres said:

To put it simply every machine displays color differently because of a variety of reasons, it the difference between "displayed color" and "actual color".

Unless they are the exact same two monitors, with the exact same calibrated color monitor display settings...

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Well done. Unfortunately, if I gave that explanation to some of my clients, their eyes would roll back in their head by the time I got to "calibrated", they'd start foaming at the mouth at "color temp" and their head would definitely explode when I got to "SWOP".

Snark
5000 degrees Kelvin? I don't think my monitor has ever gotten that hot.

Spanky Deluxe, have you tried going to View>Proof Setup and choosing a different profile? Try this on your clients computer and choose Macintosh RGB.

Am not sure if this is the problem but try it anyway.