Losing adjustment effect when saving image?

[Mononoke_kun]

Hi there, this problem is driving me round the bend. Basically whenever I try to save my finished drawing on CS6, the background texture to my drawing darkens considerably. Here are some photos of a zoomed in section for comparison.

Here's the background as I want it to look...

And here's the background I end up with...

At first I thought it was something to do with the adjustment effects on layers above the background one cancelling each other out or something, but I have no problem merging or flattening the layers together and achieving the desired look. It’s only when I go to save the image that I'm robbed of my extra texture! I’ve tried all sorts of solutions from various places online but nothing has worked. I can’t rasterize any of the layers, it doesn’t matter how I merge or flatten them, viewing at 100% zoom doesn’t do anything, saving in other formats doesn’t do anything and all my save settings are at default and modifying them has no affect.

What’s especially strange is that other lighter backgrounds don’t have this problem when I save them – there are no changes, but here it happens without fail.

I’m stumped.

[D Fosse]

The question is what application you are viewing the saved file in. Is it color managed?

This could be that the file is displayed without color management. Most monitors have a native dip in the shadows, which is compensated in the monitor profile. But if the profiles (document and monitor) are ignored, you will get a shadow darkening.

It could also be a monitor profile that is corrupt/defective. This can sometimes affect different color managed applications differently - while non-color managed apps are unaffected since they don't use the profile anyway.

Either way, we need to know if you are viewing the file in a color managed application.