color management issue?

[dpwillecke]

I thought I had this down, but I just finished processing an image that, when I post it to the web or view it in Windows, renders what appeared to be black in PWP as a flat, ugly, dark grey. In other words, PWP seem so to achieving a lower black point than my system as a whole/achieving a wider gamut? I have a Spider 4, have created a profile with it, and loaded that into windows. I know its working because I can toggle from profiled to un-profiled view in the Spider Utility. I have color management disabled in PWP. My understanding was that what I see should be the same across (non-color managed) programs because windows was controlling this using my custom profile generated by the Spider. What am I missing?

Thanks for any help you can offer,
David

[JvdW]

Hello David,

Using color management can be tricky. If you use it you should use it troughout your entire workflow and make sure you got all programs set in the right way.
In my understandig Windows CM only controles images shown with windows propriatary software (windows explorer etc.) In programs like PWP, Photoshop etc. you have to enable CM to see the right colors.
Have you converted the color profile of the image to sRGB before posting it? If you use CM your images probably have a larger colorspace like AdobeRGB. Before you put them on the web or generaly view them with non-colormanged software you have to convert the colorprofile to sRGB with an appropriate rendering intent.
Another thing to check are your monitor settings. Brightness and contrast settings are very critical to get the right colors. On most systems these settings have to be adjusted manually before calibrating the monitor.

I hope this helps and doesn't make it more confusing...

John

[jsachs]

It sounds like the image may have some kind of unusual embedded profile. Can you crop the image way down (including the part that is black/gray), save it as a JPEG and email me a copy of it (jsachs@dl-c.com).