Confused about Mac/Win discrepancies

[marco_de_biasi]

<p>Hi,</p>

<p>I'm getting some really weird shift in terms of color saturation and a bit in terms of contrast when I move from Windows to MacOSx. When I work in Windows the image looks good to me but if I move to Mac then it looks too saturated (way too much indeed) and also quite darker. I know there are different gamma values for Win and Mac but I don't know how to handle this. Also I'm aware of the monitor calibration but I cannot afford any system to do it properly on my laptop.<br>

So, any idea or tips is very welcome at this point as I'm feeling lost with this!</p>

<p>TIA!</p>

[Spearhead]

<blockquote>

<p>I'm aware of the monitor calibration but I cannot afford any system to do it properly on my laptop.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Then there is no way to help with this, and it's most likely an issue with monitors rather than platform. Have you tried running Windows on your Mac? That would be a better indicator. Also, you don't say what applications are showing the difference. If it's the browser, test with Safari or Firefox (with color management turned on) on both platforms.</p>

[marco_de_biasi]

<p>Thanks Jeff.<br /> If I look at the imagei from Win on Mac I get the same issue. About the application it seems this happens with any application I use, whether is simply the browser, PS or image viewers. I thought it was gonna be a hard issue to fix without a proper monitor calibration.<br /> The thing is on every Mac I look at the images they all look the same, over saturated. I would almost tweak manually my laptop monitor settings to react as close as possible to what I see on Mac, but I'm not sure this would be actually I good idea...</p>

[JDMvW]

<p>Are you in Photoshop on both platforms, and is the color space chosen on each the same? Just trying to think what could go wrong.</p>

[marco_de_biasi]

<p>Yes, in both OS color space is sRGB.</p>

[richard__]

<p>If you had setup color management on both systems, and profiled your output devices and this still happened, then that would be a cause for concern.</p>

<p>As Jeff mentioned, I'll bet the web browsers you use do not support color management either.</p>

<p>It appears to me that you don't actually have a problem and there is nothing to solve because the uncalibrated systems are behaving as one would expect.</p>

<p>For instance there's no common ground between them to suggest that either one is setup for proper viewing.</p>

<p>However if you would just turn off the laptop then you don't have to worry about it. It's not like anyone else will be using it to view your photos.</p>

 

[scott_ferris]

<p>The Mac has a great on board visual calibrator. Just go-System Preferences-Displays-Color-Calibrate and make sure you turn on expert mode, it walks you through the process. I found it to be very good and accurate, colour differences between my by eye profiles and puck calibrated profiles is very small.</p>

<p>Most browsers are now colour managed, though some need to be selected. Safari, Firefox and IE9 all are or do, Chrome and Opera do not, as far as i remember. T<a href="http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html">his link</a> provides tagged and untagged images, it will graphically demonstrate if you are using a colour managed browser or setting. </p>

<p>But it is absolutely key that you tag your images.</p>

[andylynn]

<p>The monitors are different, the OSes are different - calibration devices are meant for making photos look the same on different computers and in print, and without a calibrator you're not going to get this right.</p>

[digitaldog]

<p>If you are working in non ICC aware applications, the vast majority on Windows, there isn’t anything you can do about this. Mucking with your Mac to match something that is just inherently wrong isn’t a very good idea either.<br>

The reason we have color managed applications that work cross platform are to solve the problem you are reporting. FWIW, the Gamma assumption of Windows and OS X are the same.</p>

[marco_de_biasi]

<p>Thank you all for your replies. At least I'm glad to see as I thought only a calibrated system could fix the issue and there isn't much left to do on my side.</p>