I have spent many, many hours reading on the internet and trying to sort this out myself, but I just can't figure out what I'm doing wrong and I was hoping someone here could help - I cannot seem to get consistent colour between applications or when exporting for the web. (well that's not strictly true - colour-managed applications are consistently wrong)
I'm using a 15" 2.33GHz Core2 MacBook Pro, a Spyder 2 Pro for display calibration, and am currently shooting with a Fuji F30.
I have Aperture, Photoshop CS2, and the Photoshop CS3 beta but ideally I'd only be using Aperture most of the time.
My MacBook Pro's display is currently calibrated to the Spyder's sRGB target (2.2, 6500k) which is set as my display profile, but it doesn't seem to matter what I calibrate to. (2.2 native, or 2.2 D65 have the same problem) I import all my images with Aperture, intending on editing them, then exporting to be uploaded to a website.
The problem is this: in any colour-managed programs - Aperture, Photoshop, Lightroom, Preview or Safari, the colour is wrong. Blues start to turn violet, and greens are oversaturated. (to the point of looking neon in some pictures)
When I export the images from Aperture as a JPEG with an sRGB profile and view them in a non-managed application, such as Firefox, colour is perfect. Other than the lower saturation (the MacBook Pro LCD is rather poor) it matches how it looks on my camera or any other device I load the image on. However if I load up that image in Safari, which
is colour managed, it looks as it did in Aperture when trying to edit it. (completely wrong)
If I use Photoshop, the colour is also wrong, but bringing up the "save for web" dialogue box displays the correct colour for the image, and exporting using that keeps the colour looking the same in Firefox and Safari, presumably because it just removes any colour profile from it.
Soft-proofing in either program makes no difference, and neither does assigning an sRGB profile, or converting to one.
If I export from Aperture using my display profile, rather than sRGB, I get consistent colour across everything, but it is consistently wrong. (everything displays blues going towards violet etc)
If I set my display profile to a generic sRGB one, (which looks awful) load up all the colour-managed programs then switch to my calibrated profile, colour looks correct in them, though things like the loupe tool in Aperture are still wrong and if I close and re-open them, I'm back to square one. I know this is wrong, but it is the only way I have found so far to have the same colours when editing as I get when exporting the image and viewing in a browser.
As far as I can tell this is not related to my camera (at first I thought the images were being tagged with the wrong profile, if they were being tagged at all) as it seems to happen with any image that has a profile attached in these programs. I don't know if this will actually work or not (I can't trust this display) but this should hopefully show off the issue quite well:
http://sr-388.net/images/misc/colourproblems/Picture%201.pngThe top-left is Firefox (correct) with Safari on the right and Preview at the bottom. I can assure you that the difference is far more noticeable in an actual photograph than this shows. (and here's the PNG I used, for reference:
http://sr-388.net/images/misc/colourproblems/colour.png)
Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong here, or what the problem could be? I'm sure I must be doing something wrong, because right now this is pretty much useless for doing any sort of photo editing involving colour.
Thanks in advance.