Photoshop colors and .bmp colors dont match

Hi all,

Does anyone have any ideas on how to correct the following problem? The colors of pictures is much darker when working in photoshop than when I open it normally. And vice versa, I work on images inside photoshop, and I get the colors I want, but once I save it to bmp or jpg or anything else, all the colors are much lighter. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks a bunch.

btw. i'm using photoshop 7.

This has just started happening on my version of PS 7...any luck solving it?

In the preferences there is a 'Colour Settings' area. Try turning colour management off it is on. It sets the colour space that PS uses when working with images, so it might have the incorrect settings. If it isnt on, try turning it on and playing with the settings to see if you can get something close.

I've played with this a bit and while I can certainly make things look (much) worse, can't get them to look better. It seems almost like a gamut issue or something, becuase when I take a hex value from photoshop image, compress the image and then use the same hex in html to surround the image, the colors don't match; there's always a subtle, or sometimes not-so-subtle line at the image boundary.

Also, if I take a simple green square, compress it in PS to a gif, load that in a browser, it's a different color. If I open the gif in PS, it matches the original. However, if I take a screen shot of the browser and open that in PS, the color is off from the PS original.

For the project I'm working on, I had to do a color hack, and find the color that post-compression would match the original PS file color, which is a serious drag. I've heard that Fireworks handles color mapping better; any opinions on this?