Web color problems?!?!

Any experts out there (Im a software engineer and I haven't been able to figure this out, and it just started happening recently)...

When I pull up my own images and modify them, save them etc, They look perfectly exposed etc, and not too bright or too dark. When I look at stuff on Naturescapes, things look significantly darker. I've noticed this on many of my posts recently, and then today, I took it a step farther and pulled up EJ's Winter Wren in Photoshop, and it looked gorgeous. However, in the Naturescapes post, viewing it in IE, it looks extremely dark, as if it is under-exposed a full stop or more. All images I post now (and many that I see posted) look this underexposed, and look how an image looks if you click "Save for Web" in photoshop, whereas in the general editing screen for photoshop, the image looks absolutely fine, as it does pulling it up in Thumbplus or whatever other image database/viewing application.

EJ or Greg or Anyone else have any ideas on why this might be happening? To answer the first question, no I don't have my monitor calibrated, other than the gamma calibration technique suggested by EJ (I adjusted my gamma from 100 to 96 or so, but it was already pretty close to perfect given the test EJ had posted).

Thanks,

It sounds like you have a monitor profile set-up in Photoshop that compensates for your monitor being set very dark. Photoshop is monitor profile aware while IE is not. To fix it adjust your contrast and brightness so that as many of the shades of gray in the gray scale as possible are visible:
Then after you have done that, run whatever you used to profile Photoshop. If its Adobe Gamma (accessible from the control panel) run it and be very careful that you follow the directions. If you are using another profiling system, use it.

If you are using a third party profile like Monaco, ColorCal or Optical, check your start-up menu to make sure Adobe Gamma is NOT loaded and re-profile the monitor using it.

If you are using the PC platform, select the value of 2.2 for Gamma and if you are using an Apple platform, select 1.8. If given color temp options, select 6500K

My guess is that somewhere in your set-up you have one thing specified at a Gamma of 1.8 and another at 2.2 - that would cause a large shift in brightness between profile aware and profile unaware applications.

Hope this helps.

EJ, all,

Going through the Adobe Gamma wizard in Adobe Gamma (from the control panel) fixed the problem completely. My guess is I had a setting in either my monitor or in the Adobe Gamma settings that conflicted with one another. Seems I possibly adjusted something a few weeks back that caused a conflict between the two. I suggest anyone who may have the same issues (I seem to recall at least a person or two mentioning this in their images) go through the same process and make sure you follow the instructions very carefully.

Thanks again,

E.J. Peiker wrote:

If you are using the PC platform, select the value of 2.2 for Gamma and if you are using an Apple platform, select 1.8. If given color temp options, select 6500K

I believe I successfully set my Apple laptops to use a Gamma of 2.2 so that my images would not seem too dark when I place them on the web for the rest of the world to see.

Also, I'm very happy to report that my 3 year old flat panel LCD still easily displays all 16 shades of grey. If you it didn't have 3 stuck pixels, I guess you can't have everything.

LOL - well Tony if you are only seeing 16 shades above then you are missing 10 of them

E.J. Peiker wrote:LOL - well Tony if you are only seeing 16 shades above then you are missing 10 of them

Who said I could count? That's why I'm a computer programmer. The computer's suppose to count.

OK...let me ask a question. I've had problems with my images being too light. I checked and both PS and my monitor are on Gamma 1.8 as I use a Powerbook. Would it be more beneficial in my posting to change both settings to a 2.2?

Do you mean your images look too light on the screen and others look OK or everything looks light. As I recall though you are using an older laptop. Older LCD's tend to look significantly light an blowing out highlight details even though they look good on normal CRT's or newer LCD's. They just don't have the contrast range to adequately display the photos without losing detail.

LHays wrote:I've had problems with my images being too light. I checked and both PS and my monitor are on Gamma 1.8 as I use a Powerbook. Would it be more beneficial in my posting to change both settings to a 2.2?

I think it would help and that's why I did it. The bigger question is which is closer to how your printer prints the image? I think the 2.2 is closer to my printer.

Anthony Medici wrote:

LHays wrote:I've had problems with my images being too light. I checked and both PS and my monitor are on Gamma 1.8 as I use a Powerbook. Would it be more beneficial in my posting to change both settings to a 2.2?

I think it would help and that's why I did it. The bigger question is which is closer to how your printer prints the image? I think the 2.2 is closer to my printer.

Anthony
I rarely ever print out my images and since changing some of my settings, I haven't tried to print one. I'll deal with that when I get there.

E.J. Peiker wrote:Do you mean your images look too light on the screen and others look OK or everything looks light. As I recall though you are using an older laptop. Older LCD's tend to look significantly light an blowing out highlight details even though they look good on normal CRT's or newer LCD's. They just don't have the contrast range to adequately display the photos without losing detail.

EJ
When I work in PS and get the image how I want it, I then go to "Save for Web". There the image is considerably lighter. I save it and the jpg looks like the tif I was working with. When I post it on the web, it looks like what I saw when I was saving it for the web. I have a webpage that I use just to post images to see how they look on the web now before posting and these are the "lighter" version so I can at least go back to work on them again if needed. When I use to post on NPN the image looked like that of the jpg and not like the ligher web version. I don't know enough about all this to figure it out but at least I have a way of checking it before posting.

Lana, do you convert to sRGB before saving it?

Anthony Medici wrote:Lana, do you convert to sRGB before saving it?

Tony
Yes, I save in sRGB. I had been working the image in Adobe RGB and then saving in sRGB. Lately I was lazy/forgetful and have worked as well as saved the images in sRGB.

Lana, This is exactly the same problem as Chris was having only in your case its brighter rather than darker. Go back to the top of this thread and follow the instructions exactly and it should get better.

E.J. Peiker wrote:Lana, This is exactly the same problem as Chris was having only in your case its brighter rather than darker. Go back to the top of this thread and follow the instructions exactly and it should get better.

EJ
I looked at this when it was first posted. The only thing that I could check was to see if the gamma was set the same in both locations...and it was. On a powerbook, there doesn't seem to be much of a way to do any changes from the control panel.....about all I can do is change the gamma setting and white point which were where they were supposed to be. I have never used a program to "calibrate" my monitor other than what I just mentioned.

Perhaps Tony can shed some light on this one as he, I believe, has a Powerbook or at least uses a Mac.