Peter, in the Photoshop User Magazine, December 2003, there is an article by Chris Tome called True Colors, How to print what you see! and Eight Simple Rules for Color Management. To contact NAPP call 800-738-8513 or go to www.photoshopuser.com.

Thanks Daniel. And I am recent subscriber to NAPP.

But I am talking about the world of RGB. I usually use Illustrator for print, and have that part taken care of. It's just this RGB thing that is frustrating me.

I will check out that article though.

When you use that color profile in Photoshop on a Mac, it basically shows you the way it would look on a Windows display. When you view the graphic outside of Photoshop on a Mac, it will tend to look washed out.

I recommend looking, or buying one or both of these books, color management is complex to do correctly (IMHO).

Real World Color Management by Bruce Fraser

Real World Adobe Photoshop 7 by David Blatner & Bruce Fraser

Also, to get accurate feedback, you need to build a custom profile for the device, e.g., use a spectrophotometer to calibrate your monitor. You might look at GretagMacbeth�s Eye-One display.

> it basically shows you the way it would look on a Windows display

Actually, I use Windows and the colours within Photoshop still seem a bit oversaturated.

That's the best thing about type: no color.

hhp

Your post is ironic to me as I recetly slain the monitor calibration beast!

About two weeks ago I was ready to throw my crappy new iMac out the window because among other things its LCD screen represented color so poorly I was WAY feeling buyers remorse.

The problem was the only adjustments you can make are brightness and gamma. Which results in super saturated, high contrast colors over a really bright or dim white.

I called Apple service which were no help, I searched through the Apple forums, Adobe forums, and found there were NO solutions to speak of.

I finally just decided to Google it and about 6 pages in found a post in a threaded discussion about a monitor calibration application called SuperCal.

It is AMAZING! I now have perfect calibration, perfect outputs, and across the board. Give it a try and let me know what you think, I'm honestly telling everybody about this app and am now going to keep the iMac.

Check it out: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/12756

Stuart :D

Pantones Spyder solution is also an option, comperable quality, and more affordable than the Gretag stuff.

thanks Stuart, will check it out.

I don't know mark. You are right about the effect on a Mac. But when I was viewing the imagery on the 4 PC's we had at the office, they looked washed out on there as well. But if I use the Color LCD profile in PS, and design within that environment, then I get a better cross platform consitency.

Anyways, time to invest in some calibration tools.

Have a good weekend everybody.

If you have Adobe Photoshop, there is a little utility packed with it called Adobe Gamma. It has wizard and manual mode to callibrate your monitor and allows to manually set the levels of Red, Green and Blue. It has proven quite useful to me, while the Pantone Spider has given no acceptable result, as it does the callibration according to some imagined "standard", but I need to adjust the colors so that they'd look the same as they come out from my printer's offset press. Adobe Gamma does that pretty well.

"Imagined standard"?

ICC profiles are the standard, world wide. ICC stands for International Colour Consortium.

Anyway, the Spyder is for monitor calibration, nothing else. If the colours on your press are different it means you need to calibrate your press, which means you need a completely different tool.

Hi,
Recently Henrik Holmegaard (Kopenhagen) discussed the Unicode problem and WYWIWYG on the Color Sync Users List.
Henrik is a well known expert on color management and prepress in general.
His observations on OpenType fonts and CMS are very interesting. I copied some contributions in a PDF. I expect that more Typophile readers are interested in this subject.
henk

OpenType_WYSIWIS Unicode WYSIWYG and WYSIWYG Holmegaard.pdf (171.0 k)

I think it's off topic for this thread, but it is a pretty good explanation of the issues in its own area.

T