Friday, September 30, 2016

Double check your color management settings

I made a pretty big but simple mistake in my color management.  

The symptoms?  Every time I saved for web in Photoshop, the colors became too red and oversaturated.  It wasn't a problem when I used Photo Ninja, and Photoshop looked accurate until I saved as JPG.

One little detail that made Photoshop unusable for web images...  I somehow unchecked the "embed color profile" option in Photoshop's "save for web..." dialog.  Oops.  It took me awhile to find it.

So, just a reminder... 
  • Calibrate your monitor
  • Set your color-managed apps to use the biggest color gamut your monitor can handle (typically, this is sRGB or Adobe RGB, though some can go wider). I have DPP, Photoshop, and Photo Ninja all set to Adobe RGB since my monitor doesn't handle ProPhoto well.
  • Make sure you always embed the color profile in your exported JPGs (which should be sRGB, the internet standard).

Color management is way more complex than that.  For more detail, see Elle Stone's site: Nine Degrees Below Photography

Here is an example of what it looked like:

A JPG straight from Photo Ninja (correct colors):


And a JPG from Photoshop where I failed to embed the sRGB color profile:

With the proper setting, Photoshop now exports to sRGB correctly.