Color settings + Photoshop. Working with graphics! HELP!

Hello everyone.

I'm a mac user for half a year so far. Before that I was pure pc user for about 8 years. Was working on Windows OS.

Anyways, recently I've made a design for my site and it looked very well. Colors were correct when on a Mac. But I wanted to check it out how it would look on a PC. I was shocked! Colors were darker!

I realize that this is color settings issue. I went to PS color settings and RGB was set to sRGB, while Leopard was using the Cinema HD color profile. So Mac automatically switched to Cinema HD color profile, while in PS i was working with sRGB IEC61966-2.1.

I've switched to Cinema HD color profile in PS, published site. And on PC it became even more darker. Now I changed my Leopard's color settings to Cinema HD. Colors look pretty much the same. But hell, i'm not sure that it's correct way.

My question is, If there are some professionals, who do Web Designing for Macs and PCs, could you please advice me, on how to set this thing up. To get everything working correctly, so my work would look the same, no matter what machine i'm looking it on.

Thanks in advance.

OzExige said:

Happens very often, it's usually after applying styles and rasterising layers (depending on your Mac and PShop ver.), try it, good luck.

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Hey. Thanks for replay.

I'm using Photoshop CS3 and my Mac is 2008 Mac Pro (2 x 2.8 GHz, 8800 GT, 6Gb Ram + 23" ACD).

Concerning rasterizing. No. I got 3 layers, merged into one. Color remains after a merge. When I save it to the JPG file view it as a prat of my site in Safari, i see the difference. Even if I open that JPG with Preview, i see the difference between working space in photoshop and what Preview shows me.

OzExige said:

Merging is a form of rasterising (maybe not technically and it affects the colors. Try rasterising and then merging, had the problem in the past but haven't run across it lately.
Using CS3 and 2005 Mac Pro Dual 2.5 (with dual intercoolers!)

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I can't rasterize - the option is grayed out.

Anyways, I'll try to explain a bit more clear. Photoshop is set to sRGB color profile, Leopard is set to use Cinema HD color profile. Now, when I work in photoshop, color looks correct. After I open the saved image with a Preview or Safari - it's different. I've attached the screenshot.

OzExige said:

You may have to change to CMYK, sorry I can't help you further but I'm at home using my iMac and the 30HD/dual G5 is at work, experiment, experiment, experiment hmmm developer, developer, developer - sorry had a couple - it's midnight in - in - the hand of lilk and money -= I tink

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Thanks for at least trying. The only thing I have to do - experiment. For now.

Consultant said:

Photoshop
Export image to web
embed color profile

You need to get a monitor calibrator on all computers that you are doing critical color work. PCs typically are poorly set up for color work out of the box.

It will not look the same on different computers (unless the monitors are calibrated), because vast majority of computers are not calibrated.

BTW, CMYK is for commercial printing, and it's not what the OP should use. Please don't offer suggestions that are completely useless. It's like the people who give you random (wrong) directions because they are tryingto be helpful. But if you don't know, say you don't know so it won't waste everybody's time.

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Hey. Thanks for your reply.

Actually, there's no option to embed profile when you're saving to JPG and PNG file formats. Embedding ICC is possible only for JPG, but this isn't it actually.

I've posted this problem on Adobe's forums and actually there's no chance to get it identical. Macs use 1.8 gamma when PCs 2.2. That's it. Of course I could calibrate my monitor to match the PCs screen but then all Macs would have lighter designs. I just need to check my works both on Macs and PCs to see if result is acceptable.

For those who struggle with same problem, I was give a useful link. So I decided to share it with you: http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html

Hope it helps.