Reply To: [Color Profile process?

[PixnubKeymaster]

The new Adobe plugin platform can’t embed a color profile into a PNG, not sure why. The plugin tells Photoshop to save with the color profile embedded. However, Photoshop simply won’t do it for PNG. When the image is untagged, it is typically assumed to be sRGB. So if the original image was Adobe RGB and it was saved untagged, then yes the colors will come out dull. The colors will look fine when using sRGB. Therefore, when extracting PNG, you will want to use sRGB.

For TIF and PSD, it will embed the color profile. So if really NEED to use Adobe RGB (which I doubt you do), the you’ll need to use TIF.

So first question is, why are you using Adobe RGB anyway? In most cases, you are better off using sRGB. Yes Adobe RGB has a larger color gamut…. but only in the regions of highly saturated greens and to some extent cyans. So unless you are printing bright saturated green or cyan colors, Adobe RGB doesn’t really provide any benefit at all…. only the hassle of dealing with color profile mismatches. Furthermore, most PSD templates you purchase are sRGB. So for that reason, it really makes things easier to just use sRGB for the cutouts.

With EZ Green Screen, I updated the plugin in version 7 to convert all images to sRGB prior to extraction. This avoids this issue since untagged is typically treated as sRGB.

This reminds me that I was meaning to do the same in Image Extract and have it convert to sRGB before extracting…. but I forgot to implement that. So for Image Extract, I made a note to implement that change on the next release. It would still save as untagged for PNG. However, the color tables would be setup as sRGB so there shouldn’t be any color shifting if the image is assumed to be sRGB…. which is the standard way to handle untagged.

The bottom line is I can’t control how Adobe handles the saving for PNG in the plugin engine. So I can only work around what Photoshop does. I don’t think this is limited to Pixnub either. I’ve have multiple people send me images with the same issue when they outsourced the extractions and got the PNG images back from the outsourcing being untagged.

Originally, PNG was created as a web format and the web was all sRGB. So I think that may be Adobe doesn’t embed the color profile, not sure.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Pixnub.