Discrepancy in color between Photoshop window and print window

[Roel Wyman]

My photos look very dark and saturated when I load them in Photoshop 7 or Photoshop Elements 2.0, but when viewed in the printer's preview window (not the Photoshop preview window) they are normal, and they are printed in a normal fashion. This does not happen in Photodeluxe or any of a half-dozen other picture editors or viewers I have checked, and it means that I can't edit my photos in Photoshop because I don't know what they really look like!

How can I "reset" Photoshop's parameters so that the photo is not altered in its screen view before I even touch it?

Thanks

Roel

[Beth Haney]

From your description, it sounds as though you need to do some calibration of your monitor. PS 7.0 and Elements (also based on PS 7.0) are both color managed applications, which would not be true of the other applications or previewers you've used.

Ian Lyons does an extremely good job of explaining the issue of color management on his website, Computer Darkroom, and provides step by step instructions for calibrating your monitor so that what you're seeing on the screen is consistent with the prints you get. I strongly recommend you take a look at what he has to say. He says it much better than anybody here!

<http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps7-colour/ps7_1.htm>

[Jim Hess]

If you go to the Adobe Photoshop Expert Center and look under "Color Management" (I think) you will find a tutorial on how to use Adobe Gamma and then do some other things inside of Photoshop that will help you resolve this problem. The tutorial indicates that you need Photoshop 7, but it also works for Photoshop 6. After you get everything set up, you can then use "soft proofing" and I have found that the colors and everything else match very closely. For those of you who are only using Photoshop Elements, to go looking for the soft proofing features because they simply are not there. You need a full version of Photoshop to use the soft proofing features.