I recently installed CS4 (was using 6.0 before) and noticed the problem hopefully illustrated below. The screen shot shows the same image opened in PS and Picasa viewer. As you can see the colours are different, the picasa version is closer to reality. It makes it a bit difficult to adjust the images! I assume it's something to do with colour calibration of PS, I've tried a few different settings but nothing cures the problem - Any ideas anyone?



Cheers - Steve

Had another surf on the nerdy Photoshop places and found the answer, I needed to turn on "Proof Colors" and set the Proof Setup to Monitor RGB.

Are you using colour management on Picasa and Photoshop? Are they using the same ICC profile? Is your monitor colour calibrated and are you using this file for all your colour management?

Have a read at this.

Frankie Loscavio: How to Fix Color Profile - "proof colors" - Conflict In Photoshop - Creative Human

and this.

Color Management - Picasa Help

This is a bit more in depth and probably more than you really need to worry about unless you are going through the whole process to printing.

Color management: Implementation part 1

__________________
Don't worry, be happy.
Sandy
Carried it in full, then carry it out empty.

Fishtales, thanks for the links. I came to the conclusion that the ‘Proof Colours’ thing was just a bit of a fudge so went through the whole process step by step.

I re-calibrated the monitor and then made sure that Photoshop and the monitor were using the same ICC profile which didn’t make any difference at first but after a re-start, low and behold everything looks the same now – except in Internet Explorer, but there isn’t much I can do about that.

Why do all 5 minute jobs on the PC last for 3 hours!!!

How are you saving your files? I use 'Save As' rather than 'Save for Web' as using the latter seems to wash out the colours unless you convert to sRGB.

__________________
Don't worry, be happy.
Sandy
Carried it in full, then carry it out empty.

Converting to sRGB seems to work, thanks for that. To be honest I could do almost everything I need to do in free stuff like Picassa or Irfanview and I reckon I understand about 1% of the functionality of Photoshop.

Thanks again for the help - no doubt I'll be back with more questions soon.

Steve