Photoshop Colour Profiles

A quick tip for anyone wondering why their images appear washed out when ’saving for web’ in Photoshop - Check you are using a web colour profile.

I had never found this to be as big an issue when using Photoshop in Windows XP and it only caused enough of an issue on the Mac as for a recent project I’ve been using more vivid colours.

This Design Geek article explains why this happens, and how to correct it. It also explains that Windows has a higher gamma than OS X, meaning colours appear darker - which probably explains why It’s only just become an issue for me.

Ensure you’re using a web colour profile by going to Edit -> colour Settings, in Photoshop, and change the colour profile to one that has ‘Web’ in it’s name, and that the RGB working space begins sRGB followed by a series of numbers.

Edit: It seems the solution to this problem is not so simple. Somehow I’d managed to check the ‘Desaturate Monitor colours By: 20%’ option in colour Settings - which makes images in photoshop appear exactly how they appear when exporting for web. With this option unchecked, having a Web colour profile barely makes a difference to the working space colours.

There’s some helpful discussion in the comments of this blog post about colour profiles and OS X but apparantly no definitive solution. I’ve set the gamma on my Macbook to 2.2 to match Windows and that somewhat helps but is not ideal

Does anyone have any input on this?