[Redys]

hey guys.

so im in the process of designing a somewhat simple website for a program i'm launching for sale soon. in keeping with the program's design, i've made the website be very graphical, and now i'm having an issue.

i have the background color set using the hex value that Photoshop gives me. that same color i use as the background for my program and the background for all the images used within the page, so that they should look as if they were free-floating on the page.
now, in my computer, my mother's computer, girlfriend's computer, best friend's, as well as about 3 or 4 school computers, this works flawlessly. all of these computers were running Windows XP (SP1-SP3 depending on which one) and always tested on IE.

on my computer, I tested using latest versions of the following browsers:
Internet Explorer
FireFox
Flock
Opera
Safari

i've got Windows XP SP3.


now, all of that has worked flawlessly. i've gone to a lot of trouble to make sure the website works perfect across those 5 browsers.

here's my problem. i don't have a MAC to test with. i was at my lawyer's house yesterday and they've got the new MAC with the 22" screen. using Safari, you see that some of the pictures that work fine in all the computers i mentioned above, have a different background color from the page's background!
my problem is that it's not even ALL of the site images, only some. yet they've all been given the same background in photoshop!

what could be causing this? is it that the MAC monitor is so much better with dynamic ranges it's showing me a different 6 other monitors didnt? or is it a problem in the MAC OS? any suggestion as to what I should do short of making all the pictures be transparent .gifs?

thanks guys. i'm kinda OC and don't want to go online with the site until I got everything down you know...

[mirzaterak]

Link? How extreme is the difference?

Try and take a screen cap from that Mac then look at that in Photoshop see what Hex values that's reporting for the background and the images (on the mac and on your PC). I'm thinking it could be a color profile issue.

[Kghyutgykim]

The Mac monitor won't necessarily produce colors better than the other PC monitors. However, you will never be able to get a completely uniformed color space because of the ability users have to change the brightness / color temperature and what not on their monitors.

Despite your OCD if you want me to test things out I have no problem with it, and have a decent amount of experience with color calibration being a photographer.

[mirzaterak]

The Mac monitor won't necessarily produce colors better than the other PC monitors. However, you will never be able to get a completely uniformed color space because of the ability users have to change the brightness / color temperature and what not on their monitors.

But how would a brightness/color temperature change the color of two objects with the same RGB values to cause them appear differently? It's not that he's said, "I want this shade to appear the same on every monitor." He want's two object with the same color values to appear the same. He doesn't really care if they both look a little red or a little green as long as they match, which they should.

It sounds as if there's something wrong in the way one of the two is being rendered. This is why I would recommend comparing the colors in a screen shot. Which is now not the correct RGB, the page background or the image background? If it's the image have the RGB values of other parts of the image changed?

[Redys]

Link? How extreme is the difference?

Try and take a screen cap from that Mac then look at that in Photoshop see what Hex values that's reporting for the background and the images (on the mac and on your PC). I'm thinking it could be a color profile issue.

that sounds like a good reason. i dont know when i'll be able to pass by my lawyer's again to take a picture, but i'm going to go through all the pictures here at my place and compare color values. if i remember correctly there's this little app that you pass over things on your screen and it tells you the RGB...lets hope i can find it!

by the way nFerno, i dont have OCD...i just like things to work well you know :-) i was taught photography the old way, shooting in film, developing and printing in both color and black...as well as doing about 2 years of digital before life took a different turn!

[Redys]

well i think i may have hit the nail on the head

i took a picture of the whole site with print screen, opened in photoshop and then went with the color selector in different places. the background is the right color on the page and on some of the pictures. however, unbelievably, some of the other pictures have a different background color!
the difference is the background value end ins AB, and the other pictures some end in AA, some in AC, some change some numbers too, but all very minimal. it still doesn't explain why in all these other computers the difference is so minimal that nobody had noticed it except on the MAC...but it's a start...

[Tarrccrys]

I'm not sure exactly which parts are showing up incorrectly, but if it's the actual images and not the background....

You've done these images in Photoshop? Are they .jpgs? If so, it's likely they're being compressed and altering the color ever so slightly.....which would explain the slight difference in the hex value of the color. Either that, or you goofed up when creating the images lol. Ever think about just giving us a link to the page where it's hosted? Or are we not allowed to see for ourselves....

Oh, and it's not OCD, it's just called being a perfectionist. I would know, b/c I'm the same way.