Quick, quirky photoshop problem
 

Hey all. Well for some reason my grey levels in Photoshop 6 have been screwed with. Now they aren't grey, they are more brown so that when I view a photoshop project file, all the greys that would be in the picture have the browner quality. On my color swatch, the 50% grey ones and so on are all going to brown and not grey. Also, when I check my histogram under adjusting levels for an image, instead of having a bar from Blk to Grey to White, it's a bar from Blk to white with brown hues in between. Finally, when I save a file such as a jpg, and then view outside of photoshop, all the brown is back to the correct grey setting, so it's just Photoshop filtering out the correct grey settings to brown. I tried to reinstall Photoshop but it retained my previous settings. Any suggestions? Or atleast tell me how to wipe my settings clean so I can reinstall everything?

Under Edit>Color Settings>what do you have selected for your working space>RGB?

Monitor RGB - Samsung - Natural Color Pro 1.0 ICM

Try setting it to sRGB or Adobe RGB 1998 and see if the colors don't return to normal.

No help, here's a screen shot of my desktop. Notice the range of "grey" in my swatches that are brown. Then also notice the project I have open which is from my website. You can compare these colors which is the exact file I used on my site which is displayed correctly once you view this file outside of photshop......

Photoshop file:
http://www.definingfilms.com/Photoshop.jpg

Actual Page:
http://www.definingfilms.com/Projects.htm


-On an unrelated sidenote, I just discovered that people surfing with Mozilla (I'm a new convert) see a version of my site that's not correctly lined up..... damn.

Is this happening just in PS and not other programs? Is it just happening with this file or all files opened in PS? If its happening to all files in PS then it's a color management issue and it is usually caused by improper color settings in the above mention window. What are the other settings selected in Color Settings?

It's on all of them indeed. Here's a pic with all my settings...

http://www.definingfilms.com/PS Settings.jpg

I tried fooling around with this to no avail....

It may very well be a corrupt preference files in PS. I'm a Mac user and don't know enough about the file structure in a PC to know where to tell you to look for the preferences. You can try the MS uninstaller in the Control Panels and see if that gets all the files.

Resetting the Color Swatches shouldn't make any difference, but you can try that. The reset is in the drop down, in the upper right of the swatches palette.

You may want to post this on the PS forums on Adobe's site as well.

Ok, I figured it out. This will hopefully solve someone else's problem down the road if they find this post....

As I read everywhere else as well, trashing the preference files is supposed to fix most of the problems, not the case with me however.

SO, you must create a new Monitor Profile...
To do this (windows xp) you must navigate to:

ProgramFiles/commonfiles/adobe/calibration/ and then run Adobe Gamma.

If PS is open when you do this, your settings will NOT be applied until you restart the program.

Why would your monitor profile be incorrect? Well, if you purchase a new monitor, if you update your monitor drivers and there were major changes, if you reinstall or update your Windows to help slow performance etc. there's a good chance your monitor will lose it's calibration settings for color correction. Hope this helps someone down the road!