PTE and Colour Profiles

[fh1805]

I attended an RPS AV Day event yesterday and, prior to the session start, was accosted (in a friendly manner!) by an attendee who was having difficulties getting the colours to be the same in Photoshop and in PTE. I explained that PTE doesn't support colour profiles and that all images needed converting to sRGB before presenting them to PTE. I also explained that using "Save for Web" in Photoshop would do the conversion for him. He went on to say that he was running PTE on a Mac under Bootcamp and that he had done a small test as follows: he had created a short PTE sequence (using images in Adobe RGB colour profile) and then Published as Executable for PC and followed that immediately with Publish as Executable for Mac. The colours of the images, when the PC version was run on a Windows PC, were wrong (and he now understood why); but the colours of the images, when the Mac executable was run on a Mac, were correct!!!

So does PTE support colour profiles, or not? And if not, how is it that the colours show correctly on the Mac? I am unable to provide any supporting evidence of my own because: a) I do not use colour profiles at all (I'm 100% sRGB) and I do not have a Mac.

Perhaps one of you dual-hardware folks could check this out and report back, please. I'd like to know what's going on so that I have an answer for him when I next see him later this year.

regards,

Peter

[Guest Yachtsman1]

My rule of thumb on a PC has always been RGB for prints & sRGB for projected & internet images, not sure about Mac , only that people that work in the graphics industry prefer Mac for their truer colour rendition.

Yachtsman1

[xahu34]

... I explained that PTE doesn't support colour profiles and that all images needed converting to sRGB before presenting them to PTE...

That is not always the correct way to go. PTE acts in a transparent way with respect to color management. So, if the presentation device (monitor or projector) runs according to a particular color space (call it xRGB), the images should be xRGB, as well. In most cases, projectors use sRGB. Therefore, sRGB then of course is correct, but there might be exceptions!

Regards,

Xaver

[Tony Falla]

I have only recently converted to Macs but keep a PC specifically for PTE, recently however the sound packed up on the PC and as I was half way through a project I had to do a quick transfer to the Mac. My work flow on both machines is to develop images in Photoshop (CS3 on PC, CS5 on the Mac) running under Adobe RGB, I then use Save for Web & Devices to create the images for PTE. On the Mac I run PTE under VMWare Fusion 4 and there created both an exe and an app. The exe has been run on my PC (without sound), on a club laptop PC and under Fusion on both my Mac and my MacBook, the app has been run on both my Mac and my Macbook under Lion. I did not notice any significant colour change in any of these viewings.

Tony Falla

[Ray Groome]

That is not always the correct way to go. PTE acts in a transparent way with respect to color management. So, if the presentation device (monitor or projector) runs according to a particular color space (call it xRGB), the images should be xRGB, as well. In most cases, projectors use sRGB. Therefore, sRGB then of course is correct, but there might be exceptions!

Regards,

Xaver

I can confirm Xaver's comments: when I purchased a Dell U2410 Monitor and set it up with a large colour space approaching Abobe RGB, I was horrified to see the results of my PTE slide shows- the greens were too highly saturated. Fortunately with this monitor you can also select a smaller colour space of sRGB and this provided the excellent results I had become used to with my older monitor.

I obtained good results with the Adobe RGB setting on my monitor if I used images in PTE that were also in the Adobe RGB colour space.

So it is not correct to say images in PTE must be in sRGB- it all depends on the display colour space. It just happens that most monitors and projectors work in the sRGB space.

Ray Groome