photoshop colour management

the whole spoonflower process is concentrating my mind wonderfully on colour profiles, colour spaces, colour modes... there's an ongoing discussion on the spoonflower flickr group that is (slowly) enlightening me about all this stuff.

my only encounter with colour profiles to date has been the issue where i found my images appear much less saturated on flickr than they do in photoshop. in an attempt to address this i tweaked a few ps settings according to some random dude's suggestions, without really understanding what i was doing, and ended up in sRGB. i don't think this is the main cause of my colour shifts with spoonflower, but i don't think it can have helped.

it does appear to have been the right thing to do for my saturation problem at least, according to this very helpful page: "Using Adobe RGB for web images leads to washed-out looking colors in applications that are not color aware (i.e. most web browsers)".

but it looks as though i'm going to have to get a proper handle on the whole thing so i can flip between settings depending on what i'm working on. as part of my attempt to do that i'll drop any helpful links i can find here:

• dry creek photo: colour management
• peggy jones on colour management, on colour settings, a gazillion other helpful digital imaging handouts
• computer-darkroom: soft proofing explains how to use the proofing view in photoshop (lol, the what? unconscious incompetence anyone :D ) and how to create a corrective layer group (where it refers to sets those are groups in cs2, who knows in cs3...). this depends on having a colour profile specific to your printer, when you install a device it has its own profile. i guess we need to ask whether spoonflower will supply us with ps profiles for their printer and in the meantime go through those we have and choose whichever looks nearest to the results we're receiving.
• techexchange.com: colour management for digital textile printing i haven't read this all the way through yet so not sure how relevant it is.

update: stephen at spoonflower says they are hoping to be able to make an icc profile available for download at some point in the future. yay :)