Colour profiles - do you understand them?

AfroLeft

I'm just wondering what everyone else here does when they open up something in photoshop and it askes them about the profile.

I went to a seminar explaining everything about them and forgot most of the stuff a few hours after I left. Aparently most Adobe support staff just tell people to disable colour management and not to worry about them.
If you work for a games company what do you do? (eg. does the game run at sRGB or Adobe 98? or other)

I assume they have no colour profile within the game but I think photoshop deafaults to sRGB (which is really quite crap)

FatAssasin

Disable them and don't worry about it.

Seriously, they're mainly there for desingers working in print and web pages. They come in handy if you want to use the same graphic for different purposes. But for games work the most important thing is that everyone on the art team has their monitors and tv's calibrated as much as possible, so that there aren't any surprises when a texture goes from one person's computer to another's.

AfroLeft

But if someone saves all their work in sRGB, does that mean the game will run in that gamut or will it strip the profile from the texture. I'm amazed at how dull the sRGB space is. I'm not too worried about if my colour is being displayed the same on everyone's screens, I'm more worried that it just wont look as good. (yeah, its things like this that keep me awake at night)

On the other hand, a lot of gamers will use some gamma enhancing thing that came with their graphics card anyway.

FatAssasin

Just turn color management off in Photoshop and get yourself some sleep. You'll go nuts worrying about how your textures are going to appear on other people screens because you just don't have any control over that. A game engine won't read profiles anyway, there's usually some internal controls for gamma and brightness that have nothing to do with the profile.

ScoobyDoofus

A color profile really is a description of how wide a gamut of color your image represents.

I do a large amount of print & photographic work, and have to work from a variety of input sources, and output sources, so profiling is something I worry about a great deal.

For game design, profiling isnt terribly important as FatAssasin said, game engines do not recognize profiles, and really operate in their own color-space as determined by the video-card anyway.