I’ve been working on this project at work for a new client, and I’m pretty excited about it. The website is a mini-app that helps calculate your financial needs in retirement based not on what you currently have but rather what you want in retirement. It’s not your standard retirement calculator. I started the interface build this past week and learned that Photoshop was ruining my templates with its nasty color profile embedding.
For each and every PNG, GIF or JPG I sliced out of this beautiful design, Photoshop seemingly stripped the brightness and sharpness from the images. My template’s images looked perfect in Safari, Opera, and IE—even IE6!—but not in Firefox. Firefox, in which I do my initial development, is apparently the only browser in the market which acts this way: (I eventually learned) it cannot read color profiling embedded in images. Let me say that differently: Firefox 3 can read profiles, but they’re turned off and only available with an add-on or some configuration changes. I changed every possible setting in the Photoshop “Save for Web…” dialog with no success.
After further snooping and a little detective work in our design department, I learned my version of Photoshop was embedding a color profile—without my knowing—and this profile wasn’t “generic.” The generic profile means Photoshop won’t “color manage” your file and save it out to whichever format specified in true color. Interestingly enough, CS2 was making matters worse for me. I hadn’t yet upgraded to CS3 at work, so after doing just that, I followed these instructions—which should be set by default in Photoshop—and am feeling happy again.
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