- double post -

Different screens display colour differently. (This is, btw, one of the things you have to keep in mind while designing for the web - one of the many circumstances one can't control.) What you should do is calibrate both your screens with an external device.

Oh, I guess I was to quick there. Read the part about washed out colours, but missed "only in Photoshop". In that case it's probably a case of colour profiles.

Getting two screens to match is really hard to do unless you buy a good color calibration tool and don’t allow external light into the room. Your best bet is to just have one good display, keep it calibrated, but never trust it and always run test prints on a good inkjet that can handle real CMYK printing.

Yeah, the mismatch is limited to Photoshop. The worst part is that it makes everything kind of ugly. Just wrong or different would still be tolerable.

Getting two screens the same is indeed hard to do, so your best bet is to just use the same profile on both screens (in the software). It may differ optically, but at least the numbers will be the same. I would never use the screen's profile, because it isn't very universal, and you don't know what range the profile has. I'd set Photoshop to Adobe RGB (1998), which has a good color range. And also keep the profiles the same in every Adobe application for consistency (you can use Bridge to change them all at once).

Do you have the whole CS? If yes, the best way is to set the colour profile in Bridge, as it synchronises across the whole suite. Then, depending where (US, Europe, Japan?) and how you work (print/screen?), select an appropriate profile , web offset/sheet-fed offset, etc.). That way the discrepancy can be solved (perhaps?) by tweaking the screens. 2¢

These solutions do not work on uncalibrated screens. You need to start with setting up your monitors by calibrating, there is no way around it — whether you use a utility like Adobe Gamma to do it by eye or a calibration tool like Pantone’s Huey.

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

I'm by no mean an expert, since in our shop I only do black & white. My partner does all the color work. But we both use dual monitor setups, and I have listened to him grumble . . .

You absolutely, positively have to calibrate the monitors. Even for B&W. With the old CRT's, this was relatively easy, as far as painful things go. With the newer flat-screen monitors, the cheaper ones cannot be completely calibrated. Sadly, you need the costly monitors -- back lit, is it?

I do use a dual monitor setup. What I do is to keep my tools, layers, history, actions etc. on one; the "good" monitor is for the image. In point of fact, I use a CRT for the "tools" monitor and a good, albeit not the best, LCD monitor for the image. If you gotta zoom in, bite the bullet & take the time to do it on the good monitor. Otherwise, spend the 10+K for two very good monitors, or suffer as you're currently doing.

The only other tip I could offer is to pick the colorspace you want work in to fit your needs. Use it, get use to it. Periodically make a profile for your proofing printer -- laser printers seem to have to be profiled every damn day, inkjet seem to hold longer. Before printing the image, convert. If, like us, you send work off to a printer (the book "printer" not the "proofing printer" in your shop), again, see if they have a profile for you to convert to, do that, then set the color space to "same as source" (i.e., "none") in the PDF file.

If, on the other hand, your work is going to a compositor -- for example, if you're a cartographer -- do tag the images with the profile you've used. I guarantee you we don't work in the same colorspace you do. We're all better off if we just convert rather than first having to guess the proper profile to assign before converting.

FWIW

P.S. If, like me, you use a lot of layers, even having the image at 51% size won't really show what you've got. Flatten the image, take a look, and back up one step in the history to keep working. Also, I never flatten my working image before printing proofs. I make a copy, flatten that, & change it to 8-bit. That way, you can make a correction to your working image with less risk of posturizing. We do work in the 16 bit mode, changing to 8 only for final . . .did I mention that our files are pretty large?