Colors issue with Adobe & MacOSX

[nss.aries]

Hi guys, I got a problem with colors in my macbook.

When I open images with Adobe Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3 and Preview (Anteprima in italian, the default MacOSX image viewer) they are saturated and contrasted, but when i visualize them in other programs like Firefox or Painter i see they are desaturated and with low contrast.

I can't understand the reason... Photoshop color setting? So why i see them contrasted also with Preview?
And if it's a problem with MacOSX color settings, why I see the problem just with those softwares?

I grabbed some screenshots of the same picture visualized with Photoshop / Preview

and with Painter / Firefox

Can you help me, please?

 

[Anuba]

Ouch... color profiles, the biggest can of worms in graphics. You think the colors are OK. Then you open the document in another application. Then you look in another application and notice a third appearance. Then you move the picture to another platform and discover that it can look in half a dozen different ways on the same computer. So then you start messing with color profiles in Photoshop to rectify the problem, and try exporting a corrected version for side-by-side comparison. Then you find that the pictures look exactly the same side-by-side in Windows, but radically different from eachother on Mac, or vice versa.

Or, you give a Photoshop document to someone else. Then it comes back and the colors are all shot to hell, even in places where the other person hasn't touched it. And then there's the print people with their goddamn washed out CMYK colors, and you have to figure out a way to de-CMYK their pictures and turn it into decent RGB, but no automated process works, and you can't find a manual process that fixes one thing without destroying another...

Then you send the picture to 10 different people and one says it's too bright, the other too saturated, the third perfect, the fourth too green etc, and you know that it can either be their monitors or the monitor settings or the color profile or the application they happen to preview with... or just their personal taste.

Just to give an example, I have this background image for a software synthesizer that's going into an audio application. It's made in Photoshop CS3 on a Windows PC with XP. I've disabled color management on the raw Photoshop document to ensure that the color profile isn't tampered with. I put the application and a preview of the PNG side-by-side on XP, and they look identical. Then I do the exact same thing in Windows 7, and suddenly they look entirely different. In the audio application it looks normal but in the PNG preview it's overloaded with cyan saturation and looks positively poisonous. Then I do the same in OS X Leopard and it's the other way around, the image in the app looks overly saturated but the preview looks fine. So where is it wrong and how can I make the color saturation uniform across all platforms?

I HATE COLORS.

 

[Dolorian]

It has to do with the profile the image has (or lacks). I downloaded the top image of your post and opened it on Photoshop and Illustrator and the one in photoshop was lighter than the same image on Illustrator but when I assigned a color profile to the image (sRGB), it now looks the same on all applications (InDesign, Illustrator, Preview, Firefox, Photshop).