conniez68 sorry for your trouble with this issue.

The only point you need to make to a troubleshooter is Photoshop is not displaying the Tagged PDI images correctly in Photoshop. Period.

It should be routine for him to verify what profile Photoshop is using and for him to rule that profile out (about five minutes).

Moreover, a person with a working knowledge of Windows Color Management should be able to easily (and quickly) pinpoint the part of your setup that is broken by tracing the workflow back to the point where what should be happening isn't.

Another poster wrote of similar problems that involves your monitor and profiling package so maybe that's your most helpful post in solving your own issue, too.

The monitor is easy to rule out by swapping it it out.

However, the system is not so easy (because so many people have had their fingers on it).

+++++++

In your shoes, I would put in a different hard drive, Erase it, install ONLY the OS, Photoshop and updates.

If it fails at that point (with no more fiddling around), I would send it back to where you bought it and ask them why it doesn't work correctly.

If it does work at that point, either the profiling package or the monitor you swapped out is the problem, or something is amiss in your old system.

+++++++

I've seen my share of PC 'experts" at work, they always seem to fiddle around, uninstall, reinstall, fiddle around, uninstall, reinstall and come back to repeat the process...when they do solve a problem they never seem to understand why or what happened, it always seems to have magically fixed itself during their fiddling.

People who understand the question generally get right to the issue (unless there are bugs or hardware issues to slow them down).

I wish you the best luck in solving this.

this is a pretty old discussion but it was probably the only resource i found that actually helped with my colour management nightmare!

i spent weeks and wasted tons of ink and expensive photo paper and seemingly to no avail. all i wanted to do was to stop me and my wife looking sunburnt in my print outs from adobe photoshop. I even bought a new printer before i realised the fault lay elsewhere.

I have a dell u2410, on win 6 x64. I used lightroom 3.3 x64, photoshop cs5 32 and 64 bit and a host of other colour managed programs and others that were not.

what i realise now (thanks to the previous posts) was that when i opened my images in photoshop they were desaturating. This meant i over compensated in the adjustments and hence when i printed all the colours were terribly oversaturated. What i couldnt work out was that in windows 7 thumbnails and preview, i.e. not colour managed all the colours looked pretty much like the prints. But open photoshop and they were as i wanted them, neutral skin tones.

i checked and checked again that i was letting photoshop handle the colour management for prints and am 100% certain had the settings correct.

i went down the route of various ICC profiles and luckily did not invest in a calibrating device for my monitor.

to cut a long story short I found that the problem was with the ATI software and specifically the display color options (via DVI) - the color temperature control!! This was set to use EDID when unticked i found that when i opened photoshop my colours no longer desaturated!!! Woo hooo.

and the other thing was definitely disable the windows color system service mentioned in a previous post - although it sounds like it shouldnt make a difference it definitely does.

So now I had what I expected, colours look a bit naff in non colour managed software but "fairly" closely resemble what i see in photoshop, and now when i print to my canon mg5250 (using photoshop colour man) my prints "nearly" match what i see in photoshop!!

Perhaps I would now benefit from true calibration and creation of a custom icc profile but i am pretty happy with the results.

hopefully this will help anyone else in this situation

Hi there,

I just read your questions and the answers you got fom people all over the world. That's great!

But none of them provided you with an answer. I think I have it.

You can read it here: http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1006&thread=37521 609&page=2.

I think it's got to do with the camera raw settings, which you can change in the preferences panel in photoshop.

I had exactly the same problem on my system (Mac OS 10.6.8) and I was running the latest version of photoshop.

Only Jpegs and Tiffs showed this problem, when I looked at them in Bridge they turned from nice, warm looking to a cold blue and unsaturated color tone.

When I fixed my settings in the camera Raw prefs, it all went back to 'normal'.

Hope this will help.

B

Paige,

You apparently didn't go to the link provided above.  It's the Camera Raw Preferences from the Edit menu.  No rebooting necessary, no unplugging, and not a calibration issue.  Here is the dialog box:

Just make sure you have jpeg and tiff support disabled as shown.

I looked at the calibration of the monitor, but i know it’s not the monitor because the image looks fine in “windows picture viewer” application.

Anyway, tell us which OS you use and what monitor profile is configured for the OS

If I minimize bridge and then maximize, the image will look correctly saturated, but when I click my mouse, or move the window, it returns to being desaturated and has a color shift.

This sounds like smaller previews where create with the correct colorprofile, while larger are not - either before or after a change must happend. What happens when you delete Bridges cache? Same same, or did it help (they all look okay) or are the smaller previews desaturated as well then?

Jörg

Paige,

Another way of phrasing Andrew Rodney's most authoritative comments would be to say is that if your monitor has not been accurately calibrated and profiled, then your monitor profile is indeed causing your problem.  Note the conditional "if " in the preceding sentence.

You can never judge the true colors of an image in a non-color managed application, such as Windows Picture Viewer.  You can only evaluate the colors using an accurately calibrated and profiled monitor in a color-managed application like Photoshop.

here's what I found through various tests regarding Windows Photo Viewer on Win 7:

> as D Fosse stated, the general Windows Photo Viewer (open image via WPV) is color managed. If an image is untagged it will be displayed via sRGB (unfortunately not your default system profile, which could be your custom calibration profile)

> Windows Photo Viewer in SLIDESHOW MODE (open image in WPV and then click the large center Slideshow button) is non-color managed and will display images via your default system profile, the same applies to MS Paint and Windows explorer thumbnails

So on a wide gamut display, soft proofing an image in PS via your monitor RGB has the same appearance as that image in WPV in Slideshow mode or MS Paint, which is more saturated...

The above information is valid for  ICC v2 profiles - Windows has issues with ICC v4 profiles...

Iron_Mike wrote:

 

here's what I found through various tests regarding Windows Photo Viewer on Win 7:

 

> as D Fosse stated, the general Windows Photo Viewer (open image via WPV) is color managed. If an image is untagged it will be displayed via sRGB (unfortunately not your default system profile, which could be your custom calibration profile)

That's a problem because assigning or assuming sRGB may or may not be the right assumption for this untagged image. On Mac, several OS app's assume untagged doc's are in display RGB (based on your display profile). Well depending on what version of Mac OS you are running. Apple seems to move all over the map here. Anyway, the best way to be working here is without using untagged documents !

So on a wide gamut display, soft proofing an image in PS via your monitor RGB has the same appearance as that image in WPV in Slideshow mode or MS Paint, which is more saturated...

Which is a process whereby you make PS provided an incorrect preview to match the other incorrect preview. If you look at the soft proof options, you'll see Monitor RGB (use your specific display profile) or Legacy Macintosh or Internet (sRGB).

The problem with an untagged doc is even a color managed app has to make an assumption of the scale of the RGB numbers (are they sRGB, ProPhoto, display RGB, or any other flavor of RGB). When the assumption is correct, you should get a match.

If the image is tagged in sRGB and you use your display profile for soft proofing (Monitor RGB), the preview is wrong! It looks way over saturated on a wide gamut display. The image is in sRGB but you're telling Photoshop to show you how those numbers should appear if they were the display RGB which is wide gamut, thus over saturated. And if you opened the same image in a non ICC aware app, it would look very similar. If you assumed display RGB here, instead of the correct assumption (sRGB), again, incorrect preview that is over saturated.

This is a 'problem' with Wide Gamut displays in an sRGB centric world, non color managed world. We're to believe that sRGB is some standard behavior and to some degree, it is although the beavhior it defines reflects a CRT we haven't had around for years and years. To put it another way, if all sRGB similar displays were replaced with Adobe RGB like displays and all applications treated untagged data as Adobe RGB (1998), the differences in the previews would be much less. Your LCD isn't really an sRGB device. Your wide gamut display is really quite different. Untagged sRGB assumed as such or not on a sRGB like device looks pretty close (there can be differences of course). Untagged sRGB assumed to be Adobe RGB is just the wrong assumption and such, the preview is wrong.

Bottom line, 9 times out of 10, if an image doesn't match between Photoshop, Lightroom or other ICC aware applications and the one you're comparing to, chances are, the other application is not ICC aware or it is treating the RGB numbers incorrectly due to the lack of an embedded profile.