How do you fix color issues with monitor display and Photoshop?

[pattersonz]

Ok so recently my monitor started displaying all my colors in Adobe Photoshop kind of brownish, especially color black. It's like dark brown. This is happening only in Photoshop, all other programs and internet browsers are displaying black as black. How do I fix this, anyone know? I heard something about color callibrating softwares on a web design company (http://www.webdesigningcompany.net) forum , has anyone tried these? Do they work? And is this what I would need to fix my issue, or something else? Because it seems that it's an issue with Photoshop alone, not my monitor. Thanks everyone!!! :)

[Margules]

This may sound silly, but try readjusting the position of your monitor. I had a similar problem where all my photos seemed dark and the culprit was my four year old's hands. When I repositioned it, my photos were suddenly okay again. Rachel

[Priss]

I do not know about specific software to re-calibrate your monitor, but that sounds like what you should look into---There is an interesting discussion about this here (http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/colorcalibration/a/cal_monitor.htm) that might help. Let us know what you decide and what worked for you.

[Jan]

Color management is especially important if you're printing your pages yourself. You want what comes out of the printer to look exactly like what's on your screen.

The workings of color calibration are variable and sometimes complicated. There are differing methods available for calibrating monitors and printers, some of them are great, and others not so great.

And there are differences between CRT monitors and LCD monitors to take into consideration.

When I had a CRT, I used a program called Coloreal, and it was outstanding. But that was a while ago.

From what I've been reading, ColorVision Spyder2 Express is an extremely good program to use, and it works for both CRT and LCD monitors. Best of all, it's reasonably priced.

Here's the link to learn more:
http://www.colorvision.com/product-mc-s2e.php

Let's hear from any of you who have used Spyder2 and can offer a review of its capabilities and results!

By the way, RachelN makes a good point! The tilt of your monitor, as well as ambient lighting at your computer workspace can produce significant variations in the color on your screen. This is particularly important if you're using a laptop, and for this reason, I don't recommend that you do scrapbooking or any other significant graphic design work on a laptop.

[Wendy]

Hi ...

If you are using Adobe Gamma to calibrate your monitor then this is the best walk though of how to do it that I have found :)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/colin_w/Display%20Setup.htm

Wendy