Recent Macbook purchaser and have an iPhoto question

I'm happy to say that I've bought my first mac. It's a nice white Macbook. I have to say that I really am liking the layout, etc. Not sure if I'll ditch windows completely, but the mac is cool.

I have one issue that I can't seem to figure out though. I recently got married and as such I have a ton of pics from my wedding. I used a program to resize the images from the 3-4MB files that the professional photographer gave me to a more web-friendly 750k-1MB. When I try and open these images in iPhoto, however, they come up all distorted. Almost as if someone played around with the Hue and Saturation. In the preview window they show up fine and in Photoshop CS2 on my Windows pc they show up fine. They are only messed up when I try and import them into iPhoto. Any ideas what's going on here? Thanks in advance.

Sounds like a color space issue. Open one of the images in Preview. Select Tools, Get Info. On the presented Document Info window, on the Summary tab (should be the one Preview presents first), at the bottom you will see a line called "ColorSync Profile". I am guessing it says something like "Adobe RGB", or pretty much anything but "sRGB".

sRGB is more or less the least common denominator of color spaces. It has a limited color gamut, but it is reproduced decently by most monitors. With little if any tweaking ,the average mnitor will deisplay a sRGB photo with reasonable color fidelity.

Adobe RGB, on the other hand, has a much wider color gamut (can reproduce much wider range of colors) than sRGB. Pretty much all professional photographers shoot in Adobe RGB (high end cameras let you pick which color space you want to shoot in).

What happens if you display an Adobe RGB image using an image viewer/editor that doesn't understand color spaces and treats it like it was an sRGB image? Just what you are reporting. The Hue and Saturation look totally whacked out.

Now it so happens that Preview is color space knowledgeable, as are most Mac image apps. Hence your images look OK when viewed with Preview. Photoshop CERTAINLY is color space knowledgeable - its extensive color management capabilities are one of its many strong points.

Since you have Photoshop CS2 on your PC, you can fix both the color space issue AND the sizing issue all in one fell swoop. Fire up Photoshop CS2 and go to File, Scripts, Image Processor. There you can specify a folder of images to process, a folder to put the processed images into when done (don't overwrite the originals - you would lose valuable data!), AND key, you can tell it what color space to write the processed files in, and what size you want them to be. That should do the trick for you.

Image Processor is a fabulous bit of work - yet another of those amazing strengths that Photoshop has.

Thanks so much for the reply. The original files opened up fine so it turns out that the re-sizing program I was using wasn't really good. I will try Photoshop for the resizing.