Keeping Great Color When Emailing or Posting Photos to the Web
Email applications (and nearly all Web browsers) don’t support color management. So, if you’re working in Adobe RGB (1998) or ProPhoto RGB as your Photoshop color space, when you email your photos or post them on the Web, they probably look like %$*# (with the colors all desaturated and flat-looking). Ah, if only there was a trick that would let anyone you email (or anybody who sees your photos on the Web) see your photos pretty much the same way you do in Photoshop (of course, there is—I just wish I knew it. Kidding!) Here ya go:
Step One:
To convert this photo to the proper color space for emailing or posting to the Web, go under the Edit menu and choose Convert to Profile. This brings up the Convert to Profile dialog (shown here). The Source Space at the top shows you the current color space your photo is in (if you’re working in Adobe RGB [1998], like in this example, that’s what you’ll see here). For your Destination Space (what you’re converting to), choose sRGB IEC61966-2.1 from the Profile popup menu (as shown here) and click OK. That’s it—it’s ready to go.
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Step Two:
One quick way to ensure that your photo has been converted to sRGB is to look at the window’s title bar. If you’ve got Photoshop’s color space set to Adobe RGB (1998), which is pretty typical for photographers, and you just converted this photo to a different color space (sRGB), then you have a “profile mismatch.” So, you should see an asterisk right after (RGB/8) in the title bar (as shown circled here in red), which is Photoshop’s way of letting you know that your photo is one space, and Photoshop is in another. In this case, that’s a good thing.
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