Adobe Community: How to mimic non colour managed environment in CS6

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1. Noel Carboni,

Jul 12, 2012 5:57 AM in reply to nickna12

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Without a lab full of monitors that represent the mix of hardware your viewing audience out in the world might have, it's really not possible.

You can easily see what it will look like on YOUR monitor without color-management. Just choose View - Proof Setup - Monitor RGB. Uncheck View - Proof Colors when you want to return back to managed color.

-Noel

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2. Noel Carboni,

Jul 12, 2012 6:00 AM in reply to nickna12

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Thinking a bit on your goals...

Honestly, I'd just publish the images tagged with the sRGB profile and let the people with uncalibrated / oversaturated color just deal with them. If you desaturate your own images to anticipate that situation (someone viewing non-managed color on a wide-gamut display) then you'll just be a) making your images look less "vibrant" than other peoples' images to those folks, and b) making them look desaturated on monitors that ARE well set up.

Taken to a logical conclusion, you'd only want to publish in grayscale. I don't think that's attractive.

I think web publishers have to assume that, however much Microsoft drags their feet, sooner or later web browsers that do full color management will become ubiquitous. Firefox is already there, Safari is almost all the way there, IE stopped (ridiculously) halfway there, and Chrome is, well, Google software (they may get a clue one day).

-Noel

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3. c.pfaffenbichler,

Jul 12, 2012 6:06 AM in reply to nickna12

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Can anyone tell me please if it is possible to see in Photoshop what an image will look like when it is out in the un-colour managed world?

Your query seems peculiar – as Noel pointed out you can circumvent Color Management and view the image on your screen unmanaged-ly (Edit: in Photoshop), but why do you assume that would have relevance for the millions of other screens that are out there?

How familiar are you with the concepts of Color Management?

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4. Noel Carboni,

Jul 12, 2012 6:19 AM in reply to nickna12

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One other point: How are you anticipating publishing these images so that those "out in the world" will see them?

If you really are talking about your images being seen with a web browser, then there really is no one right answer. The percentages of web browser use are spread across all the browsers I mentioned above reasonably evenly... So you just can't know how well color-managed your image will be. No one can say whether IE "gets it close to right" more often than Firefox or Safari. How many people have wide-gamut monitors vs. those with older "standard" gamut displays that more closely match sRGB?

Plus I'd wager a majority of people don't have their systems set up with a monitor color profile that actually matches their monitor.

You start to see why folks who understand color-management shake their heads sometimes.

-Noel

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5. nickna12,

Jul 12, 2012 7:06 AM in reply to Noel Carboni

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Thanks.

But I ask again, if my monitor is hardware calibrated and set to sRGB, why do sRGB tagged images look oversaturated outside Photoshop (on my display, of course).?

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6. Noel Carboni,

Jul 12, 2012 7:12 AM in reply to nickna12

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I'm going to make a good guess at the context of your question...

You're looking at the images in Internet Explorer, right?

Internet Explorer only does HALF the job of color-management. What it does is transform the colors from any given image in any color space to sRGB - meaning it assumes your monitor has the gamut of sRGB no matter what the reality.

In short, it IGNORES your monitor color space and assumes it's an sRGB monitor.

This is likely the root of the problem you're seeing. The problem is with Internet Explorer not doing proper color-management!

I know that there are people who care about color have switched to Firefox or Safari because of this.

-Noel

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7. nickna12,

Jul 12, 2012 7:31 AM in reply to Noel Carboni

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Thanks. No. I'm not looking at the oversaturated images in Internet Explorer, or not just in IE9. I'm viewing in other non colour managed applications like FastStone Image Viewer (an image organiser). It is also true that when I preview the images in IE9 in the Save for Web window in Photoshop I see the same oversaturation. I am concerned because the magazine that publishes my images uses Apple Macs which have sRGB equivalent displays (I understand) and I would like to feel confident that what reaches them and is published, is the image that leaves me looking as I want it to..

My difficulty seems obvious to me. When I have effectively shrunk my display's colour gamut to that of an sRGB display, why do images still look oversaturated on it? I understand that there is a colour management jungle outside the civilised domains of Photoshop etc but when I used my (near) sRGB display (a NEC 2490/2) I never had this over saturation problem.

Could Windows colour management be messing up the colour management achieved by my display in some way?

Still baffled.

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8. gator soup,

Jul 12, 2012 8:59 AM in reply to nickna12

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>> Can anyone tell me please if it is possible to see in Photoshop what an image will look like when it is out in the un-colour managed world?

i didn't read this entire thread but that is a very easy answer in theory

Photoshop: View> Proof Setup: Monitor RGB

that "Soft Proofing" maneuver will pass your Photoshop RGB straight through to the monitor unaltered (the same as unmanaged apps do)

+++++++

though in context to your last post — "I am concerned because the magazine that publishes my images uses Apple Macs which have sRGB equivalent displays (I understand) and I would like to feel confident that what reaches them and is published" — i don't think the question was asked succinctly because you probably don't want to attempt to circumvent color management when handing off your file for print production

+++++++

the best chance you have is to hardware profile your monitor (so you get an 'accurate' monitor proof), and use and embed ICC profiles

hopefully your people downstream will use your embedded profile in their print production and convert to their printer profile...

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9. Noel Carboni,

Jul 12, 2012 10:07 AM in reply to nickna12

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I don't know the FastStone viewer at all, but there's a reasonable possibility it's not color-managed. I'd say more applications are not color-managed than are.

Gator soup makes the very valid point that the ONLY way to maximize the chance that what you're sending to other people will be properly interpreted is to:

Calibrate and profile your display.
Trust what you're seeing in Photoshop as the correct color.
Tag your images with your working profile when you save them.
Trust that your recipients know enough about color-management to get it right, or in a pinch, find out what profile they specifically need, and go back and convert your images to that profile and repeat step 3.

Color-management is not something you can ignore/avoid/wing it with. If you want to make the right choices for your settings you need to understand color-management, be sure you've gotten your color right on your setup, and provide others with properly tagged images.

-Noel

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10. nickna12,

Jul 12, 2012 11:09 AM in reply to Noel Carboni

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Thanks, Noel. I have re-checked and I see that colour management can be enabled on FastStone viewer.

I seem to have solved the problem. I uninstalled the European Profiler 5 software and installed the US Spectraview II software. I re-ran a calibration/profile and the colours now seem to work ok. That is to say - the whole display is not as saturated in sRGB emulation mode as it was in sRGB emulation mode in Profiler 5.

I have no idea what has happened. But I can now see an image that looked oversaturated outside PS as OVER saturated IN PS which is excellent as I can desaturate the image to taste and save it, and that image now looks correctly saturated outside Photoshop in both colour managed and non-colour managed environments.

Thanks for all the advice.

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11. Noel Carboni,

Jul 12, 2012 11:18 AM in reply to nickna12

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Glad to hear things are making more sense to you now.

I don't have a lot of experience with different calibrator/profilers, but I have heard that the results can differ between different models. Everything is not all as perfect as you might be led to believe by advertisements.

Given that the result of a calibration/profiling operation is twofold - creating a calibration (gamma, etc. curves) for the video card, and a profile for fine tuning by the applications, I suppose it's not difficult to think that the two parts could be somewhat different from different devices, though saturation isn't really something that can be changed by gamma curves, so that's still a bit of a mystery to me.

For what it's worth, in my own case I have "standard gamut" monitors and I have calibrated them to emulate sRGB very well, so I use the bog standard sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile for my monitors. The upside is that IE is perfectly color-managed for me, and other applications that display sRGB images without color management are also right. And of course Photoshop is right. I have specific reasons for having done this, to support my development work, and it has worked out very well for general use. But I don't have a strong need to produce wide-gamut imagery (I don't do much printing, for example, and for what I DO do, my printer wants sRGB).

-Noel

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12. nickna12,

Jul 12, 2012 11:52 AM in reply to Noel Carboni

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I think you are very wise t have x2 sRGB displays. If a large sRGB display had been available I would have bought it.

Could you bear to help me with another - display issue,please?

As part of the work I do I have to make screen recordings of images being produced for the magazine. I use Camtasia for this and they insist on a 1024x768 resolution. This has been no problem in the past with my standard sRGB display (NEC 2490/2) because the aspect ratio was right for it.

The aspect ratio was not right for the Spectraview display (2560x1440) so I used the original 2490 also attached to my graphics card to make the recordings at 1024x768.

Now, something has changed in the arrangements and when I set the 1920x1200 display to 1024x768 the image stretches as if it were in the wide display. I am defeated as to why the standard display can no longer show 1024x768 at the correct aspect ratio.

I am not aware of having changed any W7 settings - both displays are recognised. Though I do notice that under the "advanced settings for the W7 resolution window, and under the "Monitor" tab, the 2490 is not available - only the wider display (271) - here is an image that shows this:

When you open the "Colour Management" tab all the resolutions are available for the 2490/2 but as I said, when you select the 1024x768, it appears as it would (and does) on the wider display.

Can you suggest what I've done wrong and how I might fix this, please.

Thanks.

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13. Noel Carboni,

Jul 12, 2012 12:02 PM in reply to nickna12

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Do you need the entire screen to be in the display? I ask, because when I have recorded Camtasia videos I have just used the upper-left corner of one of my displays. This has the added advantage that I don't have to hide everything on my desktop, it's just out of view below or to the side.

But to answer your question, you might want to try a reboot with the second monitor attached. That might clear up the disparity in the settings. I don't really know what could be causing your software to be out of sync with the hardware; I haven't encountered that.

-Noel

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14. nickna12,

Jul 12, 2012 4:56 PM in reply to Noel Carboni

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Briliiant Noel, thanks. Rebooting didn't work but powering down the second monitor did. I wouldn't have thought of that so, thanks. Phew - that was going to be a real headache.

I did try using just an area of the big display for 1024x768 delineated by Camtasia and squeezing CS6 into the space. The problem is that all the menus extended way beyond the boundaries of the recorded area. What was your procedure?

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15. Noel Carboni,

Jul 12, 2012 5:11 PM in reply to nickna12

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For what I did the menus all happened to fit. I used a VMware virtual machine and it was configured quite simply, which suited what I was showing.

-Noel

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How to mimic non colour managed environment in CS6

Jul 12, 2012 5:34 AM

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