Colo(u)r spaces and JPEGs

dakid

dakid

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Hiya all,

I'm after what might be a quick answer to a question about colour spaces and saving JPEGs.

I often find myself doing a lot of work on an image, wrt to sorting out the white balances, general colour balances, curves, etc only to find that when I save it as a jpeg it all goes a bit wibbly. Generally the saturation increases and the reds especially so.

I think I even tried convertring into (or out of?) Adobe RGB, or whatever it was, last time but it still made no difference.

As you can tell, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but if someone were able to explain simply how I get a saved JPEG to have the same saturation/colour balance as the Photoshop file I was working on, I'd be most appreciative.

I have Photoshop CS3, if it makes any difference.

Many thanks in advance for any help :)
 
I suspect it's because CS3 is colour managing your images based on your display profile but once you're outside of CS3 that's not happening and you're seeing a big difference because your display isn't calibrated.

You could either buy a calibrator which would give you more consistent results or turn off colour management in CS3.
 
I do agree I need to buy a calibrator, but I was hoping to avoid doing that until I really start printing my photos.

I'm actually seeing the difference inside CS3 in the save-for-web preview dialog, comparing the two side-by-side. Would the whole save-for-web bit be causing the problem?
 
What working colour space are you using, either in camera (if shooting jpeg) or when exporting from your RAW app? If you're using AdobeRGB then that could cause some noticable colour shift when using Save for Web. Simplest solution is to stick to sRGB. If it's not AdobeRGB causing the problem I guess Save for Web is previewing with colour management disabled so you see it like you would online - which would make sense.

Proper calibration is the way forward really. At the moment you're working in isolation and what you see on your screen could be very different to appears on a calibrated display. The longer you work uncalibrated the more images you'll have to go back and fix once you do calibrate.
 
I too am suffering from this problem too.

I think i really should invest in a bit of calibration kit.

How do i turn off colour management in Photoshop in the mean time?
 
Turning on and leaving on Windows RGB for colour proofing should do it.
 
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