02-27-2007, 04:32 AM

I wanted to see if anyone has ever had this problem before. My family and I had a photoshoot from a photographer who edited the pics in Photoshop (on a Mac). She is contracted with a professional photo retail site ,called Pictage, that allows anyone to order prints (ala Snapfish, Ofoto, etc.). I was sent a CD-R from the company that had all the shots on them and the they looked great. When I downloaded the pics off the media and opened them in Preview, they were all there and looked great. Then, I wanted to import the pictures into iPhoto and all the color pics came in fine. However, ALL the black and white picture files came up as BLACK files in iPhoto. Same outlined shape (landscape or profile), but just black. I double-clicked on the files and they displayed in some sort of "x-ray" fashion - as if the color profile was mixed up. Here's an example of what the information looks like from one those b&w photos:

Document Type JPEG Image
File Size 740377 bytes
Color Model RGB
Depth 8
DPI Height 300
DPI Width 300
Orientation 1
Pixel Height 2048
Pixel Width 1361
Color Sync Profile Dot Gain 25%

I thought that maybe it was the "Dot Gain 25%" that was causing problems. Can iPhoto not see that color sync profile? Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

02-27-2007, 10:42 AM

300x300 what is that a "proof" disk?

can you show us the image?

02-27-2007, 03:02 PM

jnpmx, this is a very interesting problem. Odin_aa is "right on the money". Could you post one such image for us to look it? With a little experimentation on the image itself, we might be able to figure out what is going on. Thanks.

02-27-2007, 03:44 PM

Thank you both for your interest. Here are 2 pics - one is what the file looks like when double-clicked in iPhoto and the other is how it looks black in the mail thumbnail window...

True the files weren't that large, so it prob feels like a proof disc, yet I called Pictage and tried to see if it was a problem with the CD-R and of course it wasn't...

I'm interested to know your thoughts.

02-27-2007, 10:20 PM

It looks like a B&W negative.

If you purchased a proof CD from the company, contact the actual photographer and I am sure she/he would be willing to send you an email with the B&W proofs.

03-01-2007, 06:58 AM

Thank you for your input, though I have a question. If it really is a "proof" CD, then why is it that only iPhoto sees it as a B&W negative? When I open it up in Preview, everything looks great.

Apparently, Windows seems to be able to open it up fine and I'm thinking if I had Photoshop on my computer I might be able to see it as well.

Your thoughts?

03-01-2007, 10:16 AM

This is a screen shot - can you post a link to the actual image? I would love to play around with it a bit and see what I can determine. Thanks.

03-03-2007, 06:55 AM

Thanks mac57! I appreciate your willingness to help me out. It's a small file, so why don't you just provide me an email address and I will email it to you. I would be very interested to see what you come up with. All I really care about is just trying to get this series of pics into iPhoto - and understanding why the B&W photos didn't work.