Alex Hardy

I’ve been trying to find an explanation for the colour shifts we experience when exporting from Photoshop. When we preview graphics in ImageReady or open them in our Mac browsers, they appear noticeably washed out. We found the process tremendously frustrating when building the John Smith’s website, and we needed a solution.

To be honest we’d blamed Photoshop, but it turns out the Mac itself is behind it. Ironically the problem does not arise because Photoshop is stupid, but because it is clever.

Now, professional colour management is a black art that I do not claim to know. I’ve been able to gather some information, and I’ll relate my understanding:

The Problem

• Gamma is a colour setting that is most noticeable in the mid-tones.
• The Mac ships to this day with a display gamma of 1.8. This is due to its print heritage which predates the dominance of Windows and widespread use of the Internet.
• Windows displays colours in sRGB (standard Red Green Blue) with a gamma of 2.2. This setting is a de facto standard shared by TV, scanners, digital cameras and the vast majority of computers on the Internet - which are not colour managed. This is why graphics on Windows appear darker and with more contrast than on the Mac.
• Photoshop is clever enough to display an image in 2.2 gamma for editing.
• However, it can’t possibly know how to preview your image when saving for web, because there is no single display profile for the web.
• So it takes its best guess, which is to render the image to your monitor profile (if you are on a Mac, the odds are its gamma setting is 1.8).
• You will observe a colour shift in the Save For Web window, but confusingly not when you reopen the image in Photoshop (see fourth point).
• Open the graphic in a non colour managed application (like a web browser) and the shift is visible.

The Solution

As is often the case with technology, there is no 100% Right Answer, but a series of steps and choices. You have to decide for yourself which you consider to be the lesser of evils.

Firstly, you must ensure that the working RGB space in Photoshop is sRGB IEC61966-2.1 (Edit menu / Colour Settings). The easiest way to do this would be to select an Internet preset. I’m using “Europe Web/Internet.”

Work away! What you see is what Windows users will see (barring monitor variances which can’t be accounted for). You can preview how your work will appear to Mac users by selecting (View menu / Proof Setup / Macintosh RGB) and turning Proof Colours on. There’s our colour shift…

Now we come to export and where we make our choice. There are those, such as Don MacAskill of SmugMug, who recommend setting your monitor profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 for an easy life. Your monitor profile will match your working space, so hey presto! No shift!

In practise, I don’t like this method. It produces an undesirable blue cast on my iMac’s screen. Buried away in Aperture’s online support docs, Apple’s recommendation is:

Unless you have a color management expert instructing you otherwise, select a 2.2 gamma and a D65 white point.

I did this – From (System Preferences / Displays / Colour) I walked through the “Display Calibrator Assistant” and created another monitor profile called “iMac calibrated.”

This is a hotly debated step. Print professionals argue that this is not a solution for them. They go on to contend that sacrificing colour quality on your Mac screen to see things in the same way that the masses do is unwise. Better to accept the colour shift.

I agree with MacAskill, that Apple is pleasing an expert minority at the majority’s expense. Print professionals are skilled at tweaking their colour settings, while the public in general are not – they just want things to work. It all seems a bit pointless if you can’t view your own work the way you intended it. I’ve retained the new profile subject to further experiments.

As Apple gets more consumer focused I expect they’ll quietly start to ship with 2.2 gamma by default.

It seems that my wishes have been answered…

Adobe have released version 1.0 of Photoshop Lightroom, along with a trial version which replaces the downloadable beta. Prospective users would be wise to download the Aperture trial and put them through their paces in comparison to each other.

I plan to do just that and will report my observations. If anyone else cares to do the same, your comments will be most welcome.

Lightroom has launched, with Aperture squarely in its sights.

… but enough about Adobe’s lousy design.

These applications target professional and “prosumer” photographers, who naturally want to work with RAW image files. They offer powerful management, adjustment and workflow solutions without many of the design features of Photoshop - which may be surplus to such a user’s requirements.

Last year, rumour and counter-claim circulated around the quality of the original version of Aperture and the fate of its development team. Now at version 1.5.2 one can only assume that the application’s birth pains are behind it and take it on current merits.

What Lightroom loses from Aperture’s head-start, it may regain through aggressive pricing (at $199 it is $100 cheaper than Aperture) and Adobe’s clever extension of the Photoshop name, which will lend it instant credibility. You may be of the opinion that using Photoshop’s name to bolster a fledgling app weakens Photoshop, but that depends on whether you consider Photoshop to be a brand in the first place.

I consider it a product, and one so entrenched that there is little that could possibly do it harm. Adobe does risk confusing customers (…is it a cut down Photoshop? …where does Photoshop Elements fit in? …how does it stand alongside the CS family?), but clearly communicating what Lightroom is, and more importantly what it isn’t will alleviate that issue.

Superficially, there isn’t much to choose between them so I hope Adobe will offer a trial of Lightroom. Aperture offers a 30-day trial, and to be able to test drive them for comparison would be useful to many. It remains to be seen whether Macromedia’s culture of offering trials for their products will seep into Adobe.

Mostly, I’m pleased that Lightroom and the recently announced return of Premiere to the Mac signify that Adobe has regained some competitive spirit, and is no longer content to sit on its laurels.

I’ve been looking for a solution to getting photos online. I’ve noodled around with Flickr, Picasa and Ringo but I’ve pretty much dismissed Ringo because I’ve not found a satisfactory way to upload images in bulk.

Since the Mac is my weapon of choice, I import and organise my photo collection with iPhoto. Picasa looks like a very capable equivalent for Windows users, but it’s unavailable for the Mac - presumably because Google chooses not to fight a preinstalled app. They support it instead, by providing handy free Mac tools in the form of an iPhoto export plugin and a standalone uploader application.

The Picasa Web Albums website isn’t bad for a relatively new offering and is tempting because it means I can just use my existing Google account. It does lack a lot of things though, like tags*, visitor comments and is presented with Google’s usual design style - which is minimal to say the least.

In the other corner, Flickr provides links to third party tools that do the same job, although the iPhoto plugin charges a £12 registration fee.

I think Flickr wins for me because it can easily be incorporated into an Automator workflow: a Photoshop actions pack and Flickr upload plugin are freely available. This will be useful for a freelance project that I have on the cards…

For my money, Flickr is a cooler website and the Photo Album WordPress plugin is the icing on the cake. All I need to confirm now is that my phone identifies itself properly to iPhoto as a Sony Cybershot - that would be sweeeeeet **

Expect to see my humble attempts at photography on these pages in future!

[CORRECTION] *Picasa Web Albums does have tags.

[UPDATE] **It does indeed!

Today I had cause to reinstall Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2). In the absence of a convenient uninstaller I had to read the PDF file to do the job manually. As I got grumpier by the minute from failed attempts to reinstall CS2, I had time to reflect on Adobe products in general. I thought to myself “what was the last really compelling version of Photoshop?”

Having started using Photoshop extensively at version 4, I would say that Photoshop 7 is the most important release so far. I could quite happily use it even today in place of CS2 (which is Photoshop 9 in all but name).

Some of the great stuff we got between versions 4 and 7:

• The History palette (multiple undos woohoo!)
• The Actions palette (sooooo much time saved on repetitive tasks)
• Improved type controls (although it still isn’t all that great)
• Layer effects
• Layer sets (grouping layers together for easy manipulation)
• The Healing brush (brilliant, so much better than the clone tool for removing imperfections from images)
• Imageready integration (I was finally able to dump Fireworks for web graphics output)

Between 7 and CS2 we were treated to:

• A horrible nagging three disc installer
• A horrible nagging updater (“…the updater must update itself before it can check for updates…”)
• That Adobe Bridge bullshit that noone ever uses
• Annoying changes to the layer selection system
• A poorly conceived rebrand of the applications in the collection, that sacrifices easy recognition for brand uniformity - putting Adobe’s corporate vanity ahead of user’s needs

Photoshop CS3 promises an even worse icon design and universal binary versions of the applications. It’ll be a worthwhile upgrade for the performance boost on Intel Macs alone, but you could have ignored CS and CS2 entirely.

It seems to me that the Adobe of recent years is more busy pushing the perception that its products are great than working on the reality. As the second largest software company after Microsoft though, it appears that there’s almost noone left with the nerve to challenge them.

A new year means a new phone. This time it’s the Sony Ericsson K800i.

I was happy to annoy the Carphone Whorehouse salesman when I called up O2 and they were able to offer me a better deal than he could For £30 a month I get 400 cross-network minutes and 100 texts. I also get to claim £200 in rebates over the course of the 18 month contract.

I can only assume contracts are becoming longer because the increasing sophistication of phones is making it necessary in order for the networks to subsidise them.

This is my fourth Sony Ericsson mobile - I tend to go for them because I like the design and the UI doesn’t feel quite so clunky as some other phones. The main features of this new model that interest me are the 3.2 megapixel camera, push email, RSS feeds and 3G.

3.2 megapixels! My “proper” camera is only 4! Mobile phones are becoming a viable alternative for casual photography. As Dave rightly points out, there’s more to a good camera than resolution (shutter speed and low light performance for instance), but they’re getting there. It doesn’t escape my notice either that the resolution on this camera is markedly superior to that on the iPhone. I expect that the iPhone will get several improvements before it reaches UK shops, if not it will look seriously underspecced.

I’ll have to resort to third party plugins to get it working with iSync (thanks a bunch Apple), but I’m sure it’ll do nicely for the forseeable future.