Photoshop colors don't match up with anything else (wallpaper, irfanview, etc.)

[Treymac]

Hey guys. To start with, I have a Dell 2408WFP. I'm getting colour discrepancies between the colours I see when I'm working on a photo in Photoshop compared to when I view after I save it, such as in Irfanview or as a wallpaper. Photoshop's photos are much more saturated and nicer to look at.

I've put up with this for a long time, figuring that Photoshop has the correct colour profile, and that when I want to finally print, I'll get it the way Photoshop displays it. But I don't want to take this chance anymore.

I've checked the colour mode that Photoshop is using, and it's RGB Color. Does anybody else have this problem? And will Photo's, when I finally print some, look the way that do in Photoshop, or the way they appear in everything else?

 

[Garbz]

Ok two problems could be the case here, and I think you're having the more complicated of the lot.

Firstly there's the ICC profile of the image. Photoshop will read and decode these and convert the colours to look correct on your display. Internet explorer won't, your wallpaper won't either. You can check this by going Edit -> Convert to Profile, and seeing what the current working profile is. If it's anything other than sRGB (like ProPhotoRGB, or AdobeRGB) then convert it to sRGB and see if that fixes the problem. If it is already sRGB then keep reading.

Ok the second problem is that the 2408WFP is a wide gamut monitor. That means it's green is greener, and red is redder than what you would normally expect, (blues often stay roughly the same). This causes problems in that programs are not aware of this. Photoshop however is.

There's two correct ways to proceed:
1) Set your monitor to sRGB compatibility mode. Remove all colour profiles from the monitor in windows. This has the advantage of making all your apps look more or less correct. It has the disadvantage of crippling your wide gamut display. It's a shame, but sometimes worth it. Depends on the person.

2) Leave your monitor to it's default mode. Set photoshop to use a colour profile specifically for the monitor (if you don't have a calibrator then go to Dell's website and download the colour profile from their support site), and put up with the fact that only Photoshop knows how to display the correct colours on your screen. This is incidentally what I have done. I have also done a bit of fiddling with Mozilla Firefox to get it's colours looking right (you can enable display profiles in it), and I also use ACDSee Pro2 as this program also gives you the option of converting images to display correctly.


To see what display profile photoshop is loading click Edit -> Colour Settings (or something to that effect, can't remember right now), and click the down arrow next to RGB profile and have a look at what Monitor RGB says after it. (DON'T SELECT IT, just cancel out of the dialogue after you looked.) Typically it'll say Monitor RGB - sRGB IECxxxxxxx for most monitors, but if you set up or want to set up option 2 then it should say your colour profile such as in my case: "Monitor RGB - LCD2690WUxi serialno date.icc"