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What color profile settings should be used in Photoshop for web design? Does monitor calibration effect save for web images?
I keep my monitor calibrated with a colorimeter and want to make sure my colors will be consistant acros all major browsers.
I use my calibrated monitor profile for my workspace, color management off and don't embed a profile for save for web and try to use .png 24 whenever possible. Is this the best practice?
Well, the big problem is that you're going to be spending a lot of time and care in calibrating and choosing colors (good for you!) and they're most likely going to be viewed by folks who can't even work the "Brightness" buttons on their monitor. My (non-design) coworkers all have two screens, and none of them even match each other. So if you're asking "Is there any way this particular red that my client requested will always look correct based on the painstaking calibration I performed?" the answer is sadly going to be:
No.
But (and this is a pretty big but) all of the care you take is important. By keeping a consistent profile all of your pages / colors will look the same on the same monitor. Just remember that not everyone's not using the same monitor you are, so it won't always look the same.
By not embedding a profile it may leave the door wide open for a browser to override the current profile. If you can get the major browsers to agree on color handling there's probably some kind of Nobel prize in it for you.
Long story short, yes - all the care you're taking is important and the settings you are using are good (although I would personally look for a little more generic RGB profile). But there's only so much control you're going to have once your design leaves your machine and goes out into the great wide world of unknowing web users.
"Color Management" and "web development" should never be used in the same sentence, unless qualified with "don't bother," "waste of time" or "fuggedaboudit." The reasons lawndartcatcher outlined are correct. I have yet to see an office (other than a graphic design studio) where any two monitors displayed the same colors. Home computers are at least as bad.
If you work primarily on the web, then sRGB must be your default, because that is the standard for the Internet, and is what all user agents (browsers) are built to display.
DO NOT embed a color profile in images for websites. They add size to the image, but don't add any useful information, so all you do is make your pages heavier. When you Save for Web and Devices from Photoshop, be sure to uncheck "Embed Color Profile." As a safety measure, keep "Convert to sRGB" checked (in case you're dealing with an image that's in some other color space and you forget to convert it).
To answer your other questions: Monitor calibration does not affect SfW images except when you use you monitor profile as the color profile for the image (which you should never, ever do for any reason or for any purpose other than perhaps personal desktop wallpaper).
PNG-24 is useful for images with transparency. If there's no transparency involved, jpeg usually gives a smaller file for the same image quality, and for simple images with few colors, and especially if they have hard edges (logos being the classic example) .gif is often the best choice.
+1 Chris this is really a good question,exactly i don't know that deep but when i took interest by this question i found some articles on the same, might be they help you as i changed my setting according to them, please take a look, it might gonna solve you curiosity as well.
Hope at lest this should help a bit.......
My honest feeling about web color management mirrors those expressed above, but with some caveats.
Generally speaking, it DOES makes sense to maintain a color managed workflow on your end so that you can at least have a good starting point—if you're designing outside of a color managed workflow, and your monitor/software combo happen to be way out to lunch (unintended color casts, gamut and gamma problems, etc.), you increase the risk that another uncalibrated end-user's equipment is out-of-whack an equivalent amount in the opposite direction, and winds up seeing something that's twice as badly displayed than if it were designed within a color managed workflow in the first place, based on the biased color decisions you made.
In addition, while I don't ever tag graphic images (headers, navigation, backgrounds, etc.) for websites and website templates (since this can lead to ugly mismatches between hex-specified colors and color managed images that wind up getting color managed in the few browsers that actually respect color profiles), I do often tag photographs. Particularly higher-resolution images. In the rare-ish occasion that the end-user is viewing the content in a color-managed browser, the profiles ensure that the user is seeing the photograph as it was shot, and that human skin tones, skies, water, etc. are represented properly.
