Colours not as bright when pasted layer into new file

[floody]

Arhh! Cheers for that. Sweet as a nut!

The previous colour setting was sRGB IEC61966-2.1 and I changed it to the one you advised (the 1998 one), so that its the same setting as the image that the photographer supplied me with.

But all this does leave me with the overall question of which is the best colour setting to use. Was my sRGB IEC61966-2.1 colour setting incapable of displaying such vibrant colours? Or was it just that for that particular colour it displayed it differently?

I..e. should I find out which colour setting best suits my particular needs and use that? Or should I use whatever the latest setting is? Or are they all much of a muchness and I just need to make sure that all files I maybe working on have the same colour setting whatever that maybe?

Either way, I'm a happy bean now it works. Many thanks.

[artd]

Hi floody (James),

No, I don't think your sRGB color setting was incapable of displaying that vibrant color, but to do so it would need the right color numbers. Normally, Photoshop will convert from one color space to another with no problem, that's what color management is all about. But, when we copy and paste into a new file, we're given two choices... "convert to preserve color appearance or don't convert and preserve the color numbers". So, if the file we copied has an aRGB profile but the new file has a sRGB profile and we don't convert, I guess the wrong numbers are pasted into the sRGB file and the colors are wrong.

It sounds like you may have changed your working space RGB setting in Photoshop. That, of course, worked but I really meant to suggest changing the embedded profile of just that one file (the new file you were copying into)

What color space to use for your working space is really rather subjective. Some folks say that aRGB is best if you do a lot of printing. sRGB is certainly the best for images posted on the Internet. Personally, I use sRGB and never change it. Here's a good web page that should be helpful in that regard.

http://www.jseaman.com/articles/srgb.html

Anyway, I'm glad you got the color difference problem solved, and hopefully you have learned from the experience. I know I have!

Art