Robert, usually monitors are too bright for editing images. It is much easier to sell a too bright monitor instead of a correctly calibrated one. No problem if you use your computer for websurfing, editing text or games.
Leen
You can also check ‘color settings’. Mine is set at ‘no color management’ and I get something closer to what I see on my monitor. I don’t know where they keep this on a PC.
The reason "no color management" gives closer results is that it uses a generic monitor rgb settings that more accurately depict a typical uncalibrated monitor. It is not your best choice, except in cases where you can’t get the Adobe Gamma utility to accurately profile your display. I’d personally prefer the limited color management – sRGB space, so that I was working in a defined space. I know many people who dislike the "richness" of the AdobeRGB colorspace in their images.
🙂
Brent
Thanks for the suggestion Brent. I’ll give it a try.
Brent – The only problem with that is that my (untagged) camera images come into sRGB (with limited color management on) looking too dark and skin tones are far too red – not as bad as them being converted to AdobeRGB if I have full colour mangement on when they are wildly off target. If I have colour management on I have to do colour adjustment on every single image – which is a PIA. So I have teh Ignore EXIF installed and colour management off.
On a mac running Panther you can choose the colour space that color sync uses for untagged images – the option I have is to use my screen (callibrated) profile as the colour space (the default iwas one of the generic RGB profiles as you suggest). I presume that flows through into Elements choice – can anyone confirm this?
The colour management in Panther is poorly documented – Mark – you’ve just switched from 10.1.5 to Panther and I did the same a few days ago – I was having all sorts of problems until I realised that the default setting in image capture was to tag the imported images with a colour profile, I suddenly found that ignore EXIF appeared not to be working and it took me a while to realise that all my newly downloaded images were tagged instead of untagged and then even longer to track down why….And there is something broken in the way that iphoto recognises profiles – if you change a profile in Elements, save it back to the iphoto foldders, then iphoto won’t recognise the change in the organise and edit windows until you quit and reload. (and sometimes not even then…) Bizarrely the change registers OK if you play a slideshow.
Apart from that (and athe fact that session burning of discs through Disk utility is broken) Panther works much better than earlier version tho’
Susan S.
Susan,
I wonder if you’ve used AppleScript at all, to tag the camera images with "ColorMatch RGB" space. It’s a much brighter space , based on a 5000K temperature monitor . I use it occasionally , when it makes a pic look closer to what I want ( depends a lot on the lighting ). Peter Gaunt, a onetime frequent visitor here, found that as his primary solution ( he’s a MAC guy ), last that I heard from him. There’s no obvious perfect solution that I’m aware of for digital cameras and color space. I use BruceRGB mostly, now, it’s not as rich as AdobeRGB but has a good gamut for an inkjet printer. The darn digital camera would need a different profile for every different lighting condition, I’m thinking.
🙂
Brent
Susan, another sticky point is that in panther colorsync by default sets up a generic RGB profile as your working space for untagged photos. You may need to go to the Colorsync utility>prefs and change it to your monitor profile. This default is new in panther, so if you got good color before and are having trouble now, you might want to fish around in there, too.
Barbara – thanks – I’ve done that already! And actually for the first time using OSX, the colorsync option on the printer dialogue is actually working to give me decent prints – very slightly dark but the colour is extremely accurate. I suspect the darkness is due to the fact that my imac (CRT) screen can’t be totally accurately profiled with the monitor panel as I can’t adjust the brightness up high enough at the start of the process to see the image within an image as requested. ( I never have been able to)
Susan S.
