"Peter" wrote in message
Thanks for all the good advice.
Having had a good look in colour settings, I have found that if I turn colour management off I then get the same result in Explorer and PS. Is there any particular reason why I shouldn’t leave management off?
Good question. The short answer is if it woks for you, go right ahead. The longer answer is that you may be flying blind, and although your luck has been good so far it may be better for you to take a little more control of what is happening, by manually adjusting your monitor to your own satisfaction.
This can be as simple as bringing up some standard images, perhaps on a web page, once a week or so, and making sure that your monitor settings are consistent. The most important thing to look out for is loss of shadow and highlight detail. Second most important is the overall color of your monitor – whether it is too warm or cold. All of these can be adjusted, more or less satisfactorily, by eye. Adjustng your monitor this way can be educational, and is not really a problem for a one person operation.
There are also situations, and yours may be one of them, where investing in a monitor calibration device is worthwhile.
My work is mainly with technical shots for Boating magazines and non have complained about colour quality, but in recent issues I have noticed that the colour was less bright. Perhaps colour management has been acting against me since installing the new monitor, is that feasible?
The overall saturation of colors can vary, depending on what the magazine expects. If you are sending them Adobe RGB files, and they are printing them as if they were sRGB, you’ll see less bright colors when the image goes to press. So send them sRGB files, and use that as your working space as well. If you do covers, I guarantee you’ll see a jump in quality if you bone up on color correction – Dan Margulis is good – and do your own CMYK separations.
Although boating magazines can get by with so-so colors, I think you may see some benefit from calibrating your monitor. Although you can get by with a manual adjustment, figure on spending about 200 US dollars for a Spyder Pro or an Eye One display 2. The software for these devices is quite good, but count on spending a bit of learning effort.
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Mike Russell – www.curvemeister.com