My BFF's body died yesterday... and I'm supposed to be helping the family with some "generic" thankyou notes... that they can just add a note to and not have to write a full letter to each person who has done kindness for them.
HOWEVER...
I made the front of the card in PS... and the colors are GREAT! Very natural ... hair and skin are just as they were in life... on my screen in PS.
BUT... when I tried to send it to her hubby... I saw in the email that the colors are brassy and off.
Curious, I uploaded it here on DPC in my workshop... same thing! BAD brassy colors.
WHY?
Why is it that a file would look TOTALLY different ON THE SAME MONITOR in PS than it does elsewhere?
Here's a cell phone shot of the same image on the same monitor... DPC on left and PS workspace on the right. (the cellphone shot is not what I see in real life here looking at the monitor... but you can see the difference in the same image)
When I open the saved file on the same monitor... I get the same thing I see in PS.
On line it would have been converted to sRGB by the site. Likely it was also converted when you put it in the email. Check the email copy to see if it is sRGB or not.
I think you two are onto something, Alex (I didn't say "on something"... *grin*)... because...
When I "save for web"... it's normally colored.
So... when I have them printed (VistaPrint.com), what it looks like on the monitor there... is how it will print, right?
I wish I talked Geek.
Yup, you're processing in a different colorspace than sRGB. Save For Web automatically assigns sRGB. If you're using a good printer, they'll deal with this colorspace issue themselves anyway. If it's Walmartish stuff, you'll want to convert your file to sRGB before sending it to them. In the PS menu, "Edit>Convert to Profile" and choose sRGB.
If you process from RAW as a rule, using Adobe's Raw converter, next time you do one look down to the very bottom: there will be a line of blue type, clickable, telling what colorspace it's going out in: click that and you can change the default from Adobe RGB to sRGB and you won't have this issue anymore.
Color management gets complex fast and is the subject of long and helpful books. For the issue at hand, the most likely diagnosis centers on selection of color space. Color space expresses the relationship between various aspects of color (lightness, saturation, hue mainly - ranges are graphed in three dimensions hence color "space"). Some colors fit in one color space, but don't fit in another color space. Web color space, usually sRGB, is smaller than many others. When moving from one color space to another, colors that don't fit can be mapped to the closest available color, or all colors can be shifted the keep the relationships between colors about right. Either way, colors get changed, and not just extreme ones. Different devices have different color limitations that interact with color space selection.
Many photographers and many cameras work in Adobe RGB as a preferred default because this is a moderately large color space that preserves more subtle gradations and wider ranges of color than sRGB, which is the default color space for web. When Photoshop opens an image file, it can accept the color space established in the source file or assign a color space based on Photoshop settings. Color settings lurk in out of the way places in Adobe Camera Raw settings and in Photoshop settings. If you know your output will only be for web, one solution is to assign the image to sRGB right when opening it and make all adjustments within that color space and save it in that color space. If you might print the image, you can work in a bigger color space and use the "soft proof" option to show the image in sRGB. But you'll probably end up converting the image to sRGB and then tweaking it more before saving and sending. Once working in the sRGB space, screen and soft proofing view for sRGB probably will look the same. Notice that the "save for web" option typically saves in sRGB, which can make for unwanted color changes if all post processing was done in a different color space. If you save the file using the Adobe RGB but display the file in a web sRGB space, you are at the mercy of the color interpretation of the browser software and should expect that colors will change, often for the worse, and maybe differently in different browsers.
If you stick with sRGB all along, the image has a fair chance of looking the same way on another color-calibrated monitor as on your color-calibrated monitor. If the cards will be emailed (sRGB) or posted to web (sRGB), you should be pretty close this way. Just remember that how the image will look on an uncalibrated monitor is completely out of your control. And what the image might look printed is an entirely different adventure involving mapping image file color to printer/ink/paper color profile for a given display lighting type (printers usually have smaller color spaces than computer monitors, and prints depend on reflected light rather than glowing with internally generated light like a monitor screen). Best wishes in your project.
edited to add: And what Bear said (more succinctly) while I was typing away.
Find this to be a regular problem with LR to PS workflow. Lightroom uses Prophoto color space. When I export to PS its keeps that space. Problem is if I forget to change my space to sRGB and do all my edits, and then only realize at the end, when I finally do convert to sRGB the colors are always nasty. Big difference, so usually need to start all over again.
In Photoshop, the "Save for Web" dialog box has a checkbox for "Embed color profile." Be sure to check that box. All your careful work getting the colors and color space right can then ride along in the image file, available for color-aware browsers and software to use. If the box is not checked, your image gets saved without the color translation information, leaving it at the mercy of forces beyond your control.
I recently got a reminder of this when one of my brothers (the retired engineer) noticed one of my images sent by email was unexpectedly dark and unsaturated. We both use color-calibrated monitors, so he looked under the hood and found the image had arrived without an embedded color space. No idea how/when that crucial box got unchecked at my end, but I made sure to remedy that error right away.
