WhiteBalance,

spelt n. A hardy wheat grown mostly in Europe

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

What's that saying about us being separated by a common language? (grin)

Actually, your question about Photoshop's color management and Vegas is quite germane. I am still using Photoshop 5.0.2 (hope to upgrade soon) and PS5 was Adobe's first attempt at serious color management, and it caused a lot of confusion. Successive versions of Photoshop have each "evolved" color management in some way, which for some people only added to the confusion. Hopefully Photoshop 7's color management is fairly stable and Photoshop 8's color management will be effectively the same. But who knows?

I don't pretend to fully understand Adobe's color management, but I have succeeded in getting it to work after a fashion between my monitor, my scanner, and my printer (a venerable Epson Stylus Photo original model.) I do have ICC or ICM profiles for my monitor (Nanao Flexscan 9080i), my Photoshop workspace (Adobe RGB 1998) and my printer (I have ICC profiles for each of the Epson papers that I use) and I use Windows 98SE which, unlike Win98 and previous versions of Windows, supports ICC profiles.

I don't know if there are ICC profiles for NTSC or PAL DV video or later versions of Photoshop have them. Photoshop has a filter to convert an image to video legal colors, but Vegas can also do that. I personally doubt that Vegas "looks at" any imbedded ICC profiles that Photoshop might put in an image. Vegas probably doesn't even know or care where the image came from. In the Vegas 4 manual on page 168 in the section, "Creating still images for use in Vegas," alpha channels are discussed, but it doesn't say anything about color management or broadcast legal colors.

So it would appear to me that the onus is entirely on Photoshop to export a suitable image that will work without any Profile-to-Profile transformation at the receiving end, such as Vegas. If this were analogous to a Print-to-File, as it might be, you would want to apply the ICC profile of the printer/paper selection. So I am wondering if there is some Profile-to-Profile transformation that we should do in Photoshop in order to prepare an image for export to Vegas. You have piqued my curiosity, and I plan to do some research on this for my own benefit because I will be moving a lot of images from Photoshop to Vegas.

So I think you have asked a good question. I just don't happen to know the answer to it. But I couldn't resist that "spelt" thing. :-)

-- Seeker --