Imported images are very dark

[Bob Sneidar]

What happens is this: You have your monitor set to be bright and high contrast. You Open an image in Photoshop, and Adobe's own color correction adjusts the color of the image based on the current monitor profile it is set to. Now you save the file, most likely with the color profile embedded. I suspect that Revolution's importer does not take into account this embedded profile. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but it's irrelevant because Photoshop has made the adjustments based upon what it "thinks" is the right thing to do. It never is. The result is a darker file than the original. You will have the same problem if you open the file in iPhoto. 

I haven't futzed with it for some time, but I think the key is to open files in Photoshop without any color correction and save them the same way. I am still using CS2 so I cannot say for sure how to do that in later versions. There really needs to be a "Don't screw up my color" setting in all Adobe applications preferences. You can open Photoshop's preferences and tell it how you want it to handle color. 

For those who don't hate verbose posts, here is a little background:

This is a problem with Photoshop's color correction. When Photoshop was originally introduced, and for a few major releases after that, the color you picked was the color you got. One of my first graphics projects I did involved creating a photo with a blended mask to a particular Pantone color, and then placing that photo into an Illustrator document with the same Pantone color as a background. It worked perfectly. 

A year later, after Adobe decided to "correct" their color, we reopened the Illustrator document and found that the pantone color in the photo no longer matched the one in the Illustrator document! So shocked was I that I created a new photoshop document, filled with the same pantone color, placed it in another Illustrator document, created a square with the same pantone fill, and I'll be d**ned if they were not even close to the same color!!! Adobe could not even get pantone colors straight between their own apps!!!

Since then Adobe has made a shambles of color correction, which is a pipe dream anyway. The best you can do is try to come up with a "perceived" balance between color on a printed media, and color from a light source, not to mention the different kinds of printed media, i.e.. gloss vs. matte. 

Computer monitors, especially LCD monitors, do not do a terrible good job at accurate color rendering, and even when you do have a high quality color accurate LCD, and configure it as accurately as possible, you wouldn't like the look of it. People like bright high contrast displays, especially in brightly lit rooms. That is why good graphic arts companies carefully control the lighting and the quality of the equipment they use, and more than likely use CRT displays. 

http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html

On Jun 10, 2010, at 5:35 PM, Simon Lord wrote:

> The images I import into my stacks are much darker than what I see in
> Photoshop.  Is there a reason for this?  I'm working in sRGB so don't
> see a reason for this discrepancy.
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