Upgrading to Photoshop CS a couple of years ago was easily one of the best possible uses for my student ID card. The feature set is great, and the ability to directly convert RAW format images from my Canon 10D is a huge boost ot productivity.

The problem is, somewhere along the line I seem to have made a tweak to the colorspace settings that kicked off a year-long journey into madness. On my desktop machine at home -- my main box for photo tinkering -- images look rich and saturated and all sorts of cool. Once I export them to JPEG, or in fact open them in any program other than Photoshop, they fade into washed-out yuckiness. I've tried converting to and from various colorspaces before exporting, carefully examined histograms before and after export, all for naught. Eventually I gave up and just started color-correcting for what I thought images would probably look like once exported.

Today, some on-a-whim Googling yielded a webboard conversation with someone having the very same problem. The root of the problem? Photoshop offers 'live color correction' for people working on CMYK print imagesIt dynamically adjusts on-screen display to reflect how images would appear when printed -- darker, richer, more saturated. Somehow -- probably when working on a print calendar last Christmas -- I'd turned this feature on and forgotten about it. A quick trip to the View menu,the Proof Setup submenu, and voila! I was still set to 'CMYK proofing.' I changed it to 'Monitor' and everything snapped into place. JPEGs now save just as I see them in Photoshop, and I no longer have to sweat bullets correcting blindly.

Three cheers for Google! And thank you, Richard Sintchak, whoever you are, for posting the solution to a problem that's dogged me for a year.