Reply To: Editing advice for a newbie please

[Worst Case Scenario]

Pic looks nice but I’m on a calibrated mac system so that’s not much help.

Colour space and profiles  are a whole world of frustration until you can get your head around it.

Basically there is no fixed measure of colour that every one uses. And even if there were, there’s nothing to allow for the people who like to have their monitor so bright you need sunglasses.

Calibrating your monitor gets rid of any casts and sets your brightness and contrast correctly, effectively giving you a neutral blank canvas to work with. You then choose the colour space you want use.  Then if some one else with a calibrated monitor looks at your pic in the colour space you used, they will be seeing exactly what you see.

When you send to a printer you need to allow for the fact that they can not produce as many colours as you can see on screen, so you add a profile that was created for the printer which will convert the image. If you then use PS colour proofing you should see exactly what you’ll get back from the printers.

LR displays images in the Prophoto colour space, you then assign a colour space when you export images, or add a profile when you print from LR.

If you images look different in PS to LR that will be why, export them in Prophoto and they will match.

The best option to play safe is to shoot, work and export in sRGB. As this is the most widely used.

Think of it as the American dollar, it may not be what everyone uses. But if you send it to some one, they will know what it is and they can convert to what they want with out to much hassle. Your problem is that you are trying to force dollars onto people who are only  trading with shells and beads.