Save for Web in Photoshop CC – where the Chuff has it gone?

“Who’s moved my freakin’ cheese?”

Adobe have moved it……..

For years Photoshop has always offered the same ‘Save for Web’ or ‘Save for Web & Devices’ option and dialogue box:

The traditional route to the ‘Save for Web’ dialogue in all versions of Photoshop prior to CC 2015.

But Adobe have embarked on a cheese-moving exercise with CC 2015 and moved ‘save for web’ out of the traditional navigation pathway:

Adobe have ‘moved your cheese’ to here, though the dialogue and options are the same.

If we take a closer look at that new pathway:

…we see that wonderful Adobe term ‘Legacy’ – which secretly means crap, shite, old fashioned, out dated, sub standard and scheduled for abandonment and/or termination.

‘THEY’ don’t want you to use it!

I have no idea why they have done this, though there are plenty of excuses being posted by Adobe on the net.  But what is interesting is this page HERE and more to the point this small ‘after thought’:

That sounds really clever – especially the bit about ‘may be’……. let’s chuck colour management out the freakin’ window and be done!

So if we don’t use the ‘legacy’ option of save for web, let’s see what happens.  Here’s our image, in the ProPhotoRGB colour space open in Photoshop CC 2015:

So let’s try the Export>Quick Export as JPG option and bring the result back into Photoshop:

Straight away we can see that the jpg is NOT tagged with a colour space, but it looks fine inside the Photoshop CC 2105 work space:

“Perfect” – yay!…………NOT!

Let’s open in with an internet browser……

Whoopsy – doopsy…!  Looks like a severe colour management problem is happening somewhere……..but Adobe did tell us:

Might the Export Preferences help us:

In a word……..NO

Let’s try Export>Export As:

Oh Hell No!

If we open the original image in Photoshop CC 2015 in the ProPhotoRGB colour space and then go Edit>Convert to Profile and select sRGB; then select Export>Quick Export as JPG, the resulting image will look fine in a browser.  But it will still be ‘untagged’ with any colour space – which is never a good idea.

And if you’ve captioned and key worded the image then all that hard work is lost too.

So if you must make your web jpeg images via Photoshop you will only achieve a quick and accurate work flow by using the Save for Web (Legacy) option.  That way you’ll have a correctly ‘tagged’ and converted image complete with all your IPTC key words, caption and title.

Of course you could adopt the same work flow as me, and always export as jpeg out of Lightroom; thus avoiding this mess entirely.

I seriously don’t know what the devil Adobe are thinking of here, and doubtless there is or will be a work around for the problem, but whatever it is it’ll be more work for the photographer.

Adobe – if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it !!

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