Expert: LizaL - 9/9/2004

Question
I bring the images into Photoshop Elements 2 and do all my corrections and save them as jpg or tif.
They look great in my Photoshop program.
The prints that come off my printer match the image on the screen.
When I open them up in other image editing programs or when I copy them to a disk and take them to another computer that has Photoshop all the images are very very light.
I un-installed Elements and Re-installed and it did not help.
Any suggestions?
Thank you  

Answer
Hi Rob,

It's kind of hard to answer this correctly without seeing the images, but my first inclination is to say that two things are going on:

1. The color profile that was established when you saved the images in Photoshop doesn't match that of your other programs. I can think of one way to get around this. Let's say you've opened an image, worked with it, and are going to go to someone else's computer with it. Make a copy of that image, and while it's open, go to the Image pulldown menu, and select Mode, and then select Assign Profile. Here you can check "Don't color manage this document," which will temporarily disable the color profile. But make sure you do this to a COPY of the image, so you don't take away the color profile from the original.

Similarly, you could select Assign Color Profile, and from that submenu, choose Profile>Generic RGB, which should be compatible with most monitors/printers.


2. The other thing I can think of is the simple rule that no two monitors are alike. No matter how you tinker or calibrate, you're never likely to make two monitors match in viewing output.

So following that notion, I don't think you're doing anything wrong, and I don't think there's anything wrong with your Photoshop Elements 2 program. It's just differences in hardware.


But do try the color profile change. If you continue to have problems, please let me know, and you can email me a sample image, if you like, so I can try and figure out another solution.


Hope this helps!

Lisa