Expert: LizaL - 10/2/2005

Question
Hi again LizaL,

Firstly thanks for your advice. However when you describe opening a picture with white in it, or entering in the values manually. That's my problem. I have a few hundred pictures and when I open any of them (and I mean all of them) there is no white in any of them. There used to be, a week ago but not now. Photoshop is somehow recognising the white value as beige. I don't know what caused this. In Photoshop everything that was white is now beige. All photos with any white in them now are beige. I don't know if it's a bug in my application. But I've never seen it before. And can't find anything in Google about it. In the screenshot if I type in the exact numbers: 100, 255, 255 etc. It shows up as beige. I wish I could send you a screenshot of what I mean. The photos open up in other applications fine.

The beige colour is like a mustard colour. Very distinctive. Just imagine everything in Photoshop that was white is now beige. Even the greyscale is not black and white, it's black and beige.

Regards
Rob

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Followup To
Question -
Hi LizaL,

I seem to have a problem with the colours in photoshop CS 8. For some weird reason, I cannot get the true white colour. The colour picker or other methods are only showing up a yellowish colour as it's white or most white colour. Every time I open a picture it comes out with this beige colour. Any ideas..

Thanks
Regards
Rob

Answer -
Hi Rob,

What you see on your monitor is actually irrelevant to true color, although it's annoying not to see the color you expect. But what you want to go by isn't your monitor, but the actual color formula.

The values for true white look like this screen shot -- and this shows all color modes available in Photoshop:

http://little-works.com/all_experts/white_values.jpg


So try opening an image that has white in it, then use the eyedropper tool to select a bit of that white. That will make white (the area you selected) your foreground color. Click on that swatch in your tool palette, which as you know will open the color picker. And you *should* see the measurements I've shown here in my screen shot.

If that doesn't work, try creating white by typing in the values you see in the screen shot I did.

Try that, and if you still aren't registering white, or for some reason you're not able to enter those values, please post back. I've never heard of not being to create white, or any other color, for that matter, in Photoshop.

Lisa

Answer
Rob, why don't you send me one of these pictures? Then I can open it in my Photoshop, and see if the same thing happens to me.

If you will, please save it as either a .PSD file or a .JPG, and you can send it to lizal@little-works.com.

In the meantime -- if the values you type in to the color picker don't correlate with a certain color, that kind of sounds to me like it could be your monitor, or as you suggested, a bug in your Photoshop program. If it's your monitor causing the colors to appear incorrect, it might just be a simple matter of calibrating it, and I'd suggest doing that.

BTW, what kind of computer and monitor are you using? If you haven't calibrated your monitor, or aren't sure how, I'll be happy to help find you a program related to your operating system that will assist you in doing this.

Along the lines of software, have you noticed any color shifts in any other program you're using? If so, than this might lead me to believe even more that this is a hardware-related problem, and not a Photoshop issue.

Anyway -- when you get a chance, send me a sample picture and I'll see what I get when I open it.

Thanks!

Lisa