Well, it surely is a problem with your monitor settings, but, forgive me for saying this, mentioning "sending stuff to the printers" and then asking for free calibration software is a bit naive. If Adobe Gamma, the settings in PS itself and the color calibration in Windows don’t cut it, then your system is seriously bent in terms of color and some other steps are required first.
a) reset your monitor to its default color temperature and brightness
b) get rid of any color tweaking your graphics card may introduce
With a clean slate, create a color reference image (pure colors, grayscale gradient) with all color calibration turned off and see how it looks at the system level and in PS. Now you can begin to adjust settings everywhere and re-enable color profiles until the results match in sRGB space.
The rest is pretty much unpredictable. Unless you gain access to the exact color profiles of the target device (the printer) and your monitor is properly hardware calibrated, there will always be minute variations. The only thing you can do is to solely rely on your visually aligned sRGB setup and have all color profile adjustments and color space conversions done at your printer. However, even that’s assuming you do not wander too far off the default values and the sRGB is indeed "intact".
Mylenium
I have recently noticed that my picures look different when viewing with Picture Viewer than when the same picture is opened in Photoshop.
photoshop is color managed, pic viewer isn’t.
and if so, do you know of any free calibration software?
adobe gamma, (since you have cs2), but it doesn’t work well with lcds. maybe you could invest in a hardware calibrator. i think the spider express is around 100 bux.
Spyder2express is listed at $79 on Datacolor’s website.
That’s excellent value for the price. The downside is that there’s no way you can get it to generate two profiles for dual monitors.
OTOH, it’s easily upgradeable later by purchasing Integrated Color’s ColorEyes Display Pro software at $175. This works with the Spyder2 puck.
Spyder2express
that’s what i was thinking of. thanks FA!
I am probably not in the right place for this, but I want to know how I can get the Windows Picture & Fax viewer back for downloads. Adobe Photoshop pix viewer has substituted itself somehow and I haven’t a clue what to do.
Adobe Photoshop pix viewer
Is that part of Photoshop Elements?
If that question is for me it is just Photoshop basic,the one that’s free.
Photoshop basic,the one that’s free
eh, what?
