teckkang said:
Will the desktop viewers such as MSPicture Manager 2003 show the same image as CS in terms of brightness? It's very puzzling to me when images tuned in CS appear quite dark on the desktop viewers such as explorer etc... I tuned the monitor with Adobe Gamma, then edited images using the sRGB color space.
Can any comment?
This is normal with programs that don't do colour management. This explanation took me a while to understand, and sometimes I get confused too, so bear with me...
New monitors are typically calibrated to something close to SRGB (but it can never be the same), so profile mismatches may not be obvious. However as a monitor ages, colour shifts may occur, and that is when colour calibration becomes more important.
Using Adobe Gamma created your monitor colour profile. This monitor profile will probably not match SRGB because your monitor colour space is probably smaller than SRGB colour space (ie your monitor cannot display all the colours in the SRGB colour space). Instead, the purpose of the profile is to enable you to see the widest range of colours and brightness levels that your monitor is capable of.
The other thing to remember is that RGB values are not absolute, so an RGB value of 230,0,0 in one colour space may translate as 255,0,0 when converted into another colour space. Remember I said that your monitor colour space is probably smaller than the SRGB colour space? So in order to display the SRGB picture, your monitor has to convert and compress the colours to fit your monitor colour space. This explains the difference in colours that you encountered in MSPicture Manager 2003.
Photoshop is colour aware, so it can recognise images embedded with the SRGB profile and do the necessary conversions correctly. Other programs which are not colour aware may not check the embedded SRGB profile and simply display everything as if the colour profile was in your monitor colour space, not realising that the RGB values it is receiving is actually for SRGB.
If you want your pictures to display correctly in SRGB, the solution for this is to ensure that you work in SRGB working space in photoshop, save the file with the correct colour space embedded, and you use an image viewing program that is colour aware. I'm a mac user, but if I'm not wrong, ACDSee, Photomechanic and iView Mediapro are examples of such programs.
However, if you are not concerned with how the pictures look to others, eg maybe you only want to output the picture to use as your desktop wallpaper, then you should save the picture in your monitor colour space. It will then more or less match what you saw in photoshop. But you must remember that because that wallpaper is in your monitor colour space, it could look strange on someone else's monitor, so if you decide to post the same picture online, you will need to re-save the picture in SRGB colour space. In fact, as an experiment, you could try saving a picture in your monitor's colour space in photoshop and opening it up in MSPicture Manager 2003 to see if it looks the same. If it does look the same, then it means that the program doesn't read ICC colour profiles. It just displays whatever RGB colour values it receives in the monitor colour space.
I hope this helps a bit.