Don't be surprised if this thread blows up into all kinds of chaos, as most color-management threads do.

Basic color-management training, to get you to where you understand how it all works and why you'd want to choose particular settings, is likely beyond the scope of a forum.

You'll find that a number of people will tell you "do this" or "do that", trying to show you one way to achieve what you want.  Try not to latch onto suggestions like that - you really do need to try to understand how it works - there's no "one size fits all needs" setting, and their needs are not the same as your needs.  In fact, there are very good reasons for the existence of all the settings.

Lastly, there's a lot of MISinformation out there.  Try to make sense of what you read, and if it doesn't seem to make sense, question it.

Best of luck!

-Noel

As Noel says, there is no "perfect" answer for you as your requirements are different from mine, or anyone else. However, I can advise in what I think will help you create a little more consistency based on my own experience.

The first thing should be to have the same profile running both your monitor and your photoshop/lightroom programs so that you get a more accurate representation on screen. In my case, I do mostly web work so all my settings are set to sRGB which works well for me. If your printer has a profile, set it as well and keep in mind 'most' desktop printers use the RGB colour space (you can check yours through online or with the user guide). Adobe RGB has a bigger colour gamut than sRGB which might aid in your printed copies, but not necessarily the on screen ones.

The thing to keep in mind is that what you will see on screen will never match exactly what you see when printed, which i'm sure you're aware of - but you can get it pretty close. The difference being the screen colours are light based, whereas the print colours are ink.

The odd times I do send stuff to print via our office laser, the print is fairly accurate to my screen representation, certainly clearer than other peoples in the office who haven't set their systems up in the way I have.

Good luck getting a match that works for you.

Sorry, RikRamsay14.  Get your flak jacket on and prepare for the coming barrage of commentaries. 

The method you describe is nothing more and nothing less than burying your head in the sand.

Well, then change that 'never' to "usually, under reasoned circumstances".

Please explain why and under what circumstances anyone would want to use a device independent profile as a monitor profile, which should be a device dependent profile.

I say this even though I am currently using a printer profile as my monitor profile. So there, purists.

And is that the hand of God in the picture?

Lundberg02 wrote:

 

is that the hand of God in the picture?

That was a nearly mature tornado forming in Nebraska, and it dissipated at the last moment because at that time the sun went down and the temperature dropped rapidly.  I was glad, because I was camping in a travel trailer at the time, and everyone knows trailers attract tornados. 

Lundberg02 wrote:

 

Please explain why and under what circumstances anyone would want to use a device independent profile as a monitor profile, which should be a device dependent profile.

Here's one example, to answer your specific question:

You have a monitor that provides sRGB performance (e.g., via a specific sRGB setting).  You judge (and/or ensure via your own calibration) that it provides satisfactory sRGB color accuracy for your needs, so you set the monitor profile to sRGB, which is accurate in this case. 

What does this do for you?

• Images displayed in Internet Explorer, which assumes your monitor is sRGB regardless of your profile, are now properly color-managed because you have made IE's assumption valid.  By the way, Microsoft does not appear to be going to change this behavior any time soon.
• Untagged images, considering a majority of untagged images assume sRGB encoding, are displayed properly by apps that just pass them through to the display.  Some browsers do this.
• sRGB images (the majority) are displayed properly by non-color-managed apps.  If you choose to set your preferred working space to sRGB, then your own processed images will display properly using your non-color-managed apps.  Such apps include various viewers, the thumbnails in Windows Explorer, etc.
• The sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile is a clean, well-formed color profile and works well in virtually every color-managed application. It's the Windows default, so you can imagine most apps are very well tested with it.
• Screen grabs are already in the sRGB color space, so if your working space is sRGB then you gain simplicity and don't have gotchas when mixing screen grabs back into your workflow.
• Since the color-gamut is not wide, the distance between adjacent colors in a 24 bit color environment is smaller - the display of gradients looks smoother, and you might not crave 30 bit color quite so much.
• There are other subtle advantages as well, simply because so much of software development throughout history has assumed the representation of color images on computers is sRGB. It's akin to "going with the flow".

In short, setting up a soup-to-nuts sRGB system means more images match more often across more applications with a system set up this way.  If I'm not mistaken, that's about what the original poster is asking about, which is why RikRamsay's response is not unreasonable.

And there are, of course, some specific disadvantages to doing this. 

• For one thing, one does not have the direct ability to work with a wider gamut of colors.  There are those who wish to work in wider gamut color spaces, have wide gamut monitors, and wide gamut printers.  Brighter, better managed colors may well help such a person set his/her work off from the crowd.  This is starting to become more and more important in this day and age of better and better wide gamut hardware.
• It's not straightforward to set up a system so that its sRGB response is accurate, though it is doable.  Can you trust the factory sRGB calibration of a monitor that advertises sRGB response characteristics?

-Noel

You've heard the expression "close enough for government work" ?

Or "close is ok for horseshoes and hand grenades" ?

'scuse me for a second, just a few remarks for the OP...

rcheek6, this isn't very complicated in principle, but you need to narrow it down. If you can't test on another known good system, you need to isolate the problem.

1. First make sure all your files actually have embedded profiles. Which one isn't urgent for now, that's not the immediate problem.

2. Verify your monitor profile. Make a black to white gradient and look for color casts and sudden steps. Also, just for diagnostic purposes, try to replace it with a standard profile (sRGB or Adobe RGB depending on standard or wide-gamut monitor) and see if it makes a dramatic difference (it shouldn't).

One thing that is frequently overlooked is this: is your monitor too bright? Out of the box most monitors are.

3. Look carefully at the print settings. If Photoshop manages color, make sure printer color management is really off so you don't get double profiling.

The point of all this is to find out which "color management chain" has problems - document > monitor, or document > printer. They are independent.

Which browser you use can have impact on how this appears posted on the web. Leave that out of the equation for now.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Dag.  Your support means a lot to me.  I didn't actually read RikRamsay's response in great detail; all I picked out was that he was suggesting sRGB for the monitor, and I was really responding to the other posters.  My main point is that the settings are all meaningful and useful, and there really are no "just do it this way" answers.  I even said that in my first response. 

For those of you "doubting Thomases" who might dispute whether my monitors are accurately rendering sRGB, please understand that they are calibrated to be quite accurate, and they perfectly match one another - this is an sRGB reference system.  Note that I clearly described the general difficulty in assuring accuracy near the end of my post above.  But it is doable.

But also realize that "close enough for web work" isn't might not a put-down, but in fact could be quantified a real, reasonable requirement.  You might imagine that a high quality monitor that with a factory "sRGB" setting could achieve a close enough sRGB rendering, right out of the box, that a web designer could use it to create good web pages.

-Noel

Noel Carboni wrote:

 

...For those of you "doubting Thomases" who might dispute whether my monitors are accurately rendering sRGB, please understand that they are calibrated to be quite accurate, and they perfectly match one another - this is an sRGB reference system.

Sure, if you're going for the lowest-common-denominator and assume an all-web workflow and output, I have no reason to doubt that you'll be "ïn the ballpark" in an all-sRGB environment, provided your monitor is not too seriously out of whack  That is evidently setting the bar too low, and in this context one needn't be too concerned with an accurate color management.  I had presumed the original poster meant otherwise, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered to comment in the first place.

I did not intend to cast aspersions on anyone or question their credibility.  Sorry if I misunderstood.

i try to keep an open mind and am always interested in learning different ways especially from those who understand what they are doing

for me — with a hardware-profiled monitor — i believe Photoshop is already giving me a highly 'accurate' display of sRGB source images

the problem i see with setting the default monitor profile to a generic, 'uncalibrated' device-independent sRGB profile is Photoshop will no longer give me an 'accurate' display of any source image, including sRGB — because — a hardware profiling routine dials in the 'accuracy' i require in my business to proof my  projects on a trustworthy reference monitor

i have published many thousands of images on the web across thousands of web pages, and concluded the best i can do is upload sRGB (and forget about it) so i don't give it much thought these days

it's too bad these threads in this forum always seem to have a negative cloud cast over them, but there are some very basic, hard-fast rules that need to be made clear and understood if we are talking about color management in Photoshop — how Photoshop uses profiles

for me, that includes setting Photoshop up to use the correct source profile, and properly convert to 'accurate' device-dependent profiles (monitor and print spaces)

The first problem, as I hinted at before, seems to be that the realm of color-management is both complex and can/should be tailored for individual needs.

Additional difficulty comes into it because there are some good, nearly "turnkey" solutions in which you can purchase additional hardware and run a program, and have a number of things set up automatically for you.  But unfortunately, this doesn't really alleviate the need to understand what's going on.

The only real way to get things right is to understand how things work (or possibly more importantly how certain things don't work), and understand what the various settings all do so as to be able to make intelligent choices with each one.  One has to understand what to expect and what not to expect.

Add to all this the fact that the game is continually changing - browsers are coming out with more capabilities, new software packages are being released, more file formats are being recognized, profiles get loaded by Windows Update, more different devices are appearing for producing images, color-management dialogs are changing from OS to OS...  The list goes on.  It's almost a wonder any of us can keep up!

So everyone:  Please don't worry, and try to relax.  Color-management is important, but not so important to get upset at one another about. 

-Noel

Noel, the words i chose are what they are to most people, i understood what you wrote, no sense keep repeating ourselves

i am talking about Photoshop theory, not Microsoft environments or second guessing how my sRGB might appear on anyone elses web browser

i can tell you the confusion (and flying fur) here begins with posters circumventing Photoshop's color-management chain, Photoshop's ability to display color 'accurately'

setting Photoshop's Working RGB to the OS's default monitor profile is one recomendation that always seems to get a negative response here, but even that doesn't break Photoshop's ability to 'accurately' display a source document like setting sRGB as the default monitor profile

i would expect to see advice like that on Microsoft's forum, not Photoshop's, but that's just my opinion

I find colormanagementinfo.com  to be a good starting point, well-written and understandable. The colour management settings in LR are not user-editable, so no need to worry about them.

rcheek6 wrote:

 

the working space profile default is the profile created by ColorMunki for my ASUS monitor - a wide gamut monitor

Photoshop's "Working Space" settings are your way to let it know what DOCUMENT color profile you PREFER to work in.  You would generally NOT want to set the working space to a device-specific profile such as that produced by a profiling device.

Let that sink in a moment...

When Photoshop warns you, it's just telling you that the image you're about to start editing as a document does not have the color space that you have told it you prefer to work in.

As for why you might choose to prefer a particular color space, well that gets a bit subjective, but one way to start might be to think about the color space you'll need for your work products.  And you'll want that color space to be a standard, device-independent one, suitable for documents.

So, if for example, you plan to create high quality prints on a printer that can reproduce colors beyond the sRGB gamut but perhaps within the wider Adobe RGB gamut, then maybe you want to consider making Adobe RGB your preferred working space.  That your monitor can reproduce this working space substantially adds to that decision.

On the other hand, if compatibiility with several printers (local and/or online) is important to you, and at least some of these printers use sRGB, then maybe you might want to choose the sRGB profile for your preferred working space.

Believe it or not, the working space choice can also be influenced by whether you tend to work in 8 or 16 bits/channel.  Knowing that some functions and filters don't work on deeper 16 bit data, some folks choose to work at the lower depth, and at a lower depth a wide gamut profile tends to expose posterization more.  I mention this because given the above, thoughts might tend toward "well, why not just work in the widest gamut space around?"

So, assuming I didn't misunderstand you and that you've set your preferred Photoshop working space to a profile you made for your monitor, let's try to get your working space setting in Photoshop right first.  What are your specific goals for images you process?

-Noel

But how do you actually DO what you say. It isn't possible to just plunk

device independent profiles  into dependent devices, as gator has

pointed out. As I mentioned before, I have an Epson RGB gamma 1.8

profile in my monitor now, BECAUSE I WANT TO and not for any other

reason . I'm going to try some prints and then put it back to where it

was.  You seem to be saying that any sRGB is as good as any other.

If the OP, who admits to trying to understand CM, would just set his

working space to a device independent space and start over, he could get

somewhere.

All he needs to do is to stay with the profile Color Munki provides, and not change anything in that part. Once he has his basic problem solved ( poor match from the print to the monitor) then he might want to play.

I still think he is double profiling. But I would need to look at his profile, starting with the monitor and following through his process. That large of an error should be easy to spot. The road there can be daunting, however.

>> best served by adopting the Adobe RGB working space as opposed to the ProPhoto?

i will add: choose the Photoshop working space that you understand...a lot of pros work exclusively in sRGB and it is the safest color space for any number of reasons

though, i mostly work in 16-bit ProPhotoRGB and AdobeRGB because I like a big space for editing color (and can't remember the last time i forget to Convert to 8-bit sRGB for the Web)

Photoshop is super easy to configure, here is a one-click setup (Edit> Color Settings) "North American Prepress 2"

what it does is PRESERVE Embedded Profiles, and notify you of any profile mismatches so it is harder to make opening profiling mistakes

if you want different Working Spaces, just select them here

that takes care of the Source Profile-to-Monitor Profile side of Photoshop

ON THE PRINT SIDE (Source Profile-to-Print Profile)

on the Epson, I use and recommend "Photoshop Manages Colors" & "Color Mode: Off (No Color Management)" work flow outlined here:

gballard.net/photoshop/epson/cs5/

i don't use Lightroom, but if you test with ProPhotoRGB (or WhackedRGB) reference images it should be easy to spot any broken areas of your workflow

not a Windows user, but I believe this is how to configure Windows to work with Photoshop