How do I process photos on a Mac so they look right on Windows computers?

Question

Apple computers use another color profile different than the one used by Windows. Therefore, images are displayed differently in a Mac computer than in a Windows machine.

Processing a picture in Photoshop in a Mac in order to show it on Internet, maybe is not the best idea right? The resulting image in your screen will not be the same many users will see in the website you want to show it.

Which would be the best way to deal with this problem?

I notice a big difference in the blacks and whites. Mac computers usually display images with a bigger contrast.

Answer 1

Actually, images are display differently on every non-calibrated displays. If they do not, it is purely coincidental. The best way is to solve the problem for the general case:

• Make sure your images look the way you think they look by using a calibrated display.

• Embed the image profile in images so that other computers know how to interpret them.

For sharing, you really should use sRGB, which is the defacto-standard. Applications not aware of color-management have the most chances of showing that close to what it should be.

Answer 2

There is no definitive way to make images appear exactly the same on any two computers running the same OS, let alone two different operating systems.

Windows and Mac operate a different default Gamma value than Mac and that causes most of the difference with contrast appearance between the two operating systems, but you will notice a difference between any two screens on the same OS as no two screens can be identically colour managed due to physical differences at manufacture and the external ambient light hitting the display.

The quick and cheap way to get closest to a solution for your problem is to choose a colour profile from within Photoshop that suits both OS's such as Adobe RGB or sRGB.

You can spend a bit of money and get calibration hardware and software that will get you close, but it will never be perfect.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Images will always look different on different computers. The best you can do is to make sure that your own screen is calibrated so that you have a consistent baseline.

Even calibrated screens will not show images exactly the same. Different screens have different limitations, and calibration tools can not measure the light in the exact same way that eyes see it.

Also the viewing angle can affect how you see an image. If you display the same image at the top, bottom, right and left on a screen, you will see quite a big difference between them on some screens.

For publicing an image on the web, the sRGB color space is recommended, as that is supposed to be the native color space of an average generic uncalibrated monitor. Even if the target monitor is calibrated, it makes good use of the color space.