on my screen the images look great but on another

[stacibeth]

So I shot and edited some interiors for a client. The images look great on my screen, yet horrible on on hers. I started reading about color profiles and monitor claibration and obvioulsy this is the issue.

I have now calibrated my monitor with the adobe gamma tool in the control panel, but how can I make sure my client sees the image, the way it looks on my screen.

Do I need to embed a profile? If so how?

Sorry, I am new at color management and don't quite get it. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

ps- I am using a PC windows xp and photoshop cs2

[Mark D Segal]

If you are doing this kind of work for clients and you are depending on them being able to see images properly on their uncalibrated and unprofiled display, you need to arm yourself accordingly to prevent these kinds of disappointments.

Firstly, no serious attempt at good colour management should rely on Adobe Gamma for adjusting a display. If your display can make use of it, invest several hundred dollars in a calibrating/profiling/colorimeter package for fixing the behviour of your display and then disable Adobe Gamma in the your Start Menu, so at least one end of the hardware part of the process is colour-managed.

Secondly, you should convert your images to sRGB with Black Point Compensation enabled and embed this profile in the image. This way, the recipient display will have a better shot at reproducing your colour intentions about right. You do this using the Convert to Profile command in Photoshop's Edit menu.

If you don't know how to do these things, buy some materials and do some watching and/or reading, such as the Reichmann-Schewe "From Camera to Print" DVD tutorial available on this website, or the many free resources on this website and others which explain how to set-up a colour-managed workflow; as for books, Andrew Rodney's book on colour management, or Tim Grey's Colour Confidence would be very useful. But the two points I made above will most likely solve your immediate problem.

[TimG]

A quick fix, at least until you get up to speed on color management and acquire the necessary hardware, would be to suggest the client come to you to review.

Also, I agree with MarkDS suggestion to disable (read: stop using) Adobe Gamma and use sRGB.

[pegelli]

The only way to solve this is to make sure your client also profiles his monitor.

I agree Adobe Gamma is not very good but it's better than nothing and will give you a little better consistency on both ends to start with. A better option is to invest in hardware and perform the real profiling at both ends.

[tongelsing]

I have not a direct answer because every client has a different monitor, but your own monitor should be hardware calibrated.
But what I do when color is critical is making a good (calibrated workflow) print and show it, give to the client. A good print is much more reliable for how the picture looks like/was taken.
Explain it to our client why you did this to give him some insight. This is important because very often  clients will send your pictures by mail or other electronic means to bussinessrelatives and they  too look most of the time on noncalibrated monitors.

Ton