colour crazy

[Dafke]

I'm busy designing a very simple website for my mom's business, but i'm having some troubles with the colours.
I have a .pdf file of a brochure that was made by somebody else, and i want to use the same colours as were used in this brochure, for a continuity in all the media expressions. So i open this .pdf in Photoshop and here the colours allready begin to vary. I understand there's a difference between printed media and the way it's displayed on my monitor, but there's also a difference between the .pdf openened in Preview and Photoshop. Anyway, after this i designed an image in Photoshop with these colours and import it in Flash, to use it as a background. Now the apple-green turned out washed out yellow-green and the bright red got sort of fuzzy!
I also tried using Illustrator at a certain point but this changed it all again!

What am i doing wrong? Is there anything i have to do with colour profiles or something like that? Any help is appreciated!

 

[Makosuke]

Is there anything i have to do with colour profiles or something like that?

Simply put, yes. I'm not enough of a print expert to tell you exactly what you want to be looking at, and the fact is color management across media (and even across individual programs or monitors) is a dark art so far as I can tell from experience, so good luck.

Photoshop recognizes the color profile of a PDF and displays accordingly, where I doubt Preview does, which I assume is where your difference is coming from.

Here's an easy tip, though: If, when you open the PDF you're interested in in, say, Preview, it looks the way you believe it aught to, you can do this to "extract" accurate colors from it for the web: Go into your Utilities folder and pop open "DigitalColor Meter"; it will let you sample any pixel onscreen and get the exact hex code of the color so you can drop that into any web page.

Of course, keep in mind that even on the web a given color can look significantly different depending on both the color profile of the computer it's being viewed on, the OS (default gamma is usually different between a Mac and a PC), and the monitor (which can make a HUGE difference), so getting overly anal is just asking for frustration. Interesting to note, however, that a good modern web browser can color correct images to match the appropriate gamma settings for the computer on which they're being viewed (at least on a PNG graphic).

 

[Abstract]

I think that if you personally colour-calibrate every monitor you use, the colours should come out more consistent, but I'm not sure.

 

[Dafke]

okay, i managed to get the colours right in Photoshop, so i have this jpeg file i want to use. now the odd thing is that when i open the file in Preview its fine, when i look at it in the thumbnail i get in Finder it is not fine, and when i export the jpeg into Flash it isn't fine either! Any more ideas? Thanks a lot so far! I appreciate your input!