I have been wrangling some calibration and color-profiling issues myself and have some ideas.
For one, I've noticed all kinds of strange things happening for my clients ever since system 10.4.9. We use a USB Spyder calibrator which is now not even recognized by the computer any more unless I plug it into a non-built-in USB port (in a nutshell; it's more complicated than this 🙂
Anyway, it sounds like the retail disks Belly got were 10.4.10 or the systems were upgraded to 10.4.10 after install. It may be tricky for you to get your hands on pre 10.4.9 disks but if you can, I would not discount the insane possibility that 10.4.8 will "fix" your profile situation. Crazy, I know...but so is your problem!
This being said, your posts from page 4 got me thinking.
In particular, you say
Any photograhic image that had been previously created or altered in Adobe CS1 apps display as slightly too contrasted and intense in colour in Preview.
Further to this, I will give an example: I had taken a photo of my friend with a digital camera. On my Panther disk, I opened the jpeg, resaved it as a native psd file with an Adobe RGB 1998 embedded profile, and used levels to adjust the contrast a bit.
On my laptop with the newly installed Tiger, I opened both photos in Preview. The unaltered jpeg looks perfect and the Photoshop file appears too dark and my friend's skin too reddish.
This is significant. Kurt, I haven't done tests recently but I used to test out how images looked in Photoshop and Safari and there were major differences because of the way in which Safari is color-profile aware. I would have to get creative with my Photoshop profiles in order to get an exact match between what Photoshop displayed and what Safari displayed. Basically I imagine this extends to Preview and I don't think Preview is "intelligent" enough to display a profiled image identically with how Photoshop displays a profiled image, let alone one in AdobeRGB. A red-shift is a common result of a misapplication of AdobeRGB because Preview will tend to think everything is actually just sRGB and misrender anything that is profiled otherwise.
That being said, I'm not surprised that edited images that would have looked good (under Panther) look dramatically different from the unaltered images when opened in Preview. For one, the profiles of the images are probably different. In the above example, the altered image is in AdobeRGB and the unaltered original is probably in sRGB or unprofiled. Unprofiled is basically the same as sRGB since 99% computers, monitors, cameras, scanners, printers slap on an sRGB variation as the default for an unprofiled image.
And for two, if other test images were altered under profile-juggling or previous profiles, it could be that they are now being revealed, in part, for what they are.
But here's a way to get everything on even ground, including the great recommendations Kurt and Joe have already made.
They're right about getting a calibrator of course because it'll eliminate considerable wiggle from your experiments. If you don't want the 200$ ones, the Huey Pro or Spyder Express are in the 60-120$ range and are well-reviewed. In a pinch, the monitor profiles that came with your monitors seem like they should work well enough... they'll be similar to sRGB which is, in turn, similar to AdobeRGB. But they're NOT the same so know this: if you have Photoshop profil confusion and look at an AdobeRGB in sRGB interpreted mode, it WILL look a bit contrasty, redder, weird. Preview will likely choke on this and Safari as well. Firefox or iView will have their own versions.
The only way to normalize everything is to CONVERT TO SRGB. I wouldn't let Photoshop do this automatically when you open the image -- no, you need to see what it starts in and then CHOOSE what it ends in. AdobeRGB is a great color-space it EDIT in, but usually your finished product has to be converted (NOT assigned) into sRGB.
Basically the standard for all of our devices -- printers, cameras, scanners, monitors, web -- is some variation of sRGB. It's not quite as rich as AdobeRGB but anything you want to display consistently in the end, you've to "Convert to sRGB." So my photographer client shoots in AdobeRGB and then converts to sRGB as the last step when the image will be displayed in an online gallery or submitted to the lab to be printed (although her lab now takes AdobeRGB profiled images directly which is great, publishing for web-view must involve a "convert to profile" sRGB step).
Now personally, unless you are drafting graphic design documents for print labs that specialize in publication, I would make your default working Photoshop space AdobeRGB-based and NOT CMYK. It'll simplify things and it sounded like you might (or the originator of this thread) be working in a default CMYK space. I would also set everything to "Preserve Embedded Profiles" for now so that you can babysit and control what gets converted and what doesn't. You don't want the embedded profiles modified without your knowing it. Not at this stage in the game.
As an aside, have you ever used the "Convert to Profile" or "Assign Profile" features of Photoshop? In CS1 I think it might be under Image or File...in CS2 they moved it under Edit. Both are very powerful and make a big difference if you use the wrong one. And my introduction to them showed me what happens when you assign an image that is really sRGB as AdobeRGB and vice versa. You'll get a red-shift contrast. Ironically, by setting your monitor profile to AdobeRGB, you are interpreting a default sRGB color-space as AdobeRGB which, again, will create color shifts. sRGB and AdobeRGB aren't that different but they're different enough! So steer clear of "assign profile" because it's the road to misapplication of profiles (unless you're fixing a previous mistake like where your Photoshop was accidentally set to strip profiles). Stick to "convert to profile"...
Basically, after putting your computer in the default monitor profile or sRGB or, at most, a calibrated-by-eye profile (again, I wouldn't put your whole computer in AdobeRGB mode even if it seems to work in Panther...sRGB will at least pretend to be what other people will see -- i.e. they'll see how their uncalibrated monitor butchers an sRGB-standard image multiplied by how yours butchers the standard. In other words, it'll work better than you might think 😉
So
a) put your monitor in some calibrated mode (2.2 gamma, 6500K temperature) or, the monitor or sRGB profile.
b) make sure Photoshop is set to preserve the embedded profiles so that you can see what each image natively purports to be.
c) make sure the working space for Photoshop is set to AdobeRGB or sRGB -- this doesn't matter as much...AdobeRGB is richer but if you have to eventually get everything into sRGB, you may just want to start off there.
d) make sure View-->Proof Colors is off in Photoshop
e) open several copies of the same image (and multiple copies of multiple images if you'd like)
f) click at the arrow (or whatever) at the bottom of the image window that lets you say you want to see the "document profile" for the images. What profile does it say they are?
g) Go up to "Convert to Profile" (via File, Edit, or Image depending on your Photoshop) and convert EACH of the images to sRGB (IEC61966). Even the "unaltered" images need to be converted as your camera may embed a generic camera profile that Preview, etc is not savvy with. Unaltered just means you haven't edited them but all images need to start out with the right profile.
h) for saving, try two things as you may get slightly different results.
h1) do a save-as to save each one as a high-quality jpeg on your desktop but UNCHECK where it says "embed profile"
h2) do a save-for-web (sometimes under the Export submenu) and adjust it to a high-level jpeg...the key here is to UNCHECK where it says "ICC profile"
i) now check out all these images in Preview or Safari or both...now whatever differences you see are the result of whatever edits you did to the images (while looking at them using whatever screen you edited with). You've leveled all of their profiles. These results control for the native profiling behavior of Safari, Preview, and Photoshop and will at least eliminate some variables. The key is to Convert your images to sRGB and then, ideally, strip them of their profiles when posting them to the web (for print, you can ultimately keep the sRGB attached). Now you can only strip images of their profiles because every device out there assigns sRGB to images devoid of profiles...so it's pretty much the same as leaving the sRGB on... it is the universal default and most devices will try to look at your images this way.
Now, I don't think this will solve your total problem because you were seeing the crazy colors on your desktop icons and background. If it were just photos or images then the problem is the profile wrangling...Illustrator handles profiles differently from Photoshop and is set to CMYK by default so you have to convert there too... things are different between AdobeRGB and sRGB but worlds different between CMYK and RGB.
If you can get even the cheap calibrator, it will make a big difference. Don't worry about Panther because it should work best for Panther, given these hiccups you've run into with Tiger. I love Panther. Granted, your worry IS possible that a calibrated monitor will reveal your previous setup to be a candyland of crazy color, but doubtful -- sounds like it was working well so your original Panther colors can't be that out there.
Speaking of Panther, I'm a big fan of rolling machines back to Panther... for many computers it's faster, handles Photoshop with ease, and the benefits of Tiger do not tend to justify it on older machines...but we live to upgrade and I don't blame you -- there are good things about it. But if the problem IS magically with 10.4.10 etc, I'd love to see if you had a similar problem with 10.4.8!
In any case, the above profiling procedures are the way to go ... as you upgrade your machines to new ones, you'll find that the standards will save you headaches 😉
Famous last words, I know.
