Help With Color Profile/Management

Hello,

I have been having a problem for some time now, but recently It has been bothering me more and more and causing me to waste more time and money.

The problem is I design a nice website in PS or a business card in Ill. and on my machine things look fine. However, when I publish the website or sent the file to the client often the colors are off some. Websites are often darker on other peoples computers. To sum it up often times things just don't look like they _should_ look on other computers.

Now I am running a dual monitor setup and both monitors are Samsung 700DF. When I go to Color Management tab it says
Current monitor: Samsung 700DF
Default minitor profile: S700DF

My monitor(s) have the brightness at 50 and the contrast at 100. Everything looks crisp and clear but the variation between my machines and others is killing me.

I have asked a couple fellow friends, to check their settings for me, and one of my buddys says his 'Current monitor' correctly lists his Sony Trinitron monitor but where it says 'default monitor profile' it just says <none>. Most machines I have checked just say '<none>'. Is this what my machine should say so I can design stuff t hat will look the same across the board? Instead of using the S700DF profile for my monitor? I have tried adobe gamma but that doesn't seem to do much.

I cannot remove the profile it seems. I click 'remove' and it says 'an error occurred when disassociating S700DF.icm'. I can remove my whole monitor(s) from the device manager but everything is back to normal upon a the next restart.

So I ask you? What profile are you using? Does it look the same on other machines? And what can I do to get my color setup corrected? HELP!

Thanks!

- Jared

 

I have NONE listed in my color profile using a Radeon 9500 Pro. My colors seem to be fairly consistent accross various laptops and the monitors I have hooked up. There are variations for sure, but not a lot that is really noticable unless I start getting nitpicky.

I wouldn't be surprised if your profile is making a difference - probably designed so that your colors show closer to a truer definition. I know that corel draw comes with a utility to do color matching - printer and monitor, and I think photoshop does as well, but as far as matching other peoples systems, I'm not sure what you can do. I have a sheet I got from ProjectSeven that lists colors that display well on the web, but it's not something they offer for free. I bet if you search around you can find something similar.

 

Could be that Illustrator and PS are using adobeRGB, but the Internet uses sRGB, which often will show the images darker. Work in sRGB, and for sure not in CMYK, at least for web output. There is quite a difference.

Brian

 

Check your monitor's settings, gamma in particular. You can find a simple test here:

http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/index.html

There's also a couple of useful links on this page, if you are into technical details.

Also, check your gamma settings in PS. I'm not using PS and can't tell you where to find this setting, but it should be set at 2.2. I tried different settings, but 2.2 seems to be the best for the web (CRT).

J.D.