Saving icons for preserved color accuracy in Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Sep 3, 2010 - Leave a Comment

Icon-Problem

If you’ve ever created an icon for an app in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you may have noticed that the colors are represented slightly differently, and sometimes a bit washed out or saturated after you save them. Apparently this is because of Snow Leopard’s color management and how it handles colorspaces.

Have no fear, there is a solution! The folks at Panic Software (creators of my favorite FTP client, Transmit) have a solution to accurately save icons in Snow Leopard, and it goes something like this:

  • Within PhotoShop click on “Edit” and go down to “Convert to Profile
  • Select “Generic RGB Profile”
  • Now “Save for Web” and make a Generic RGB PNG of the icon (be sure to uncheck “Convert to sRGB”)
  • Drag the new color-corrected PNG file into Icon Composer, and save

Now your icon should render colors exactly as intended with the proper Generic RGB profile applied to it.

Head on over to the Panic Blog for a full walkthrough with screenshots.

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Posted by: Manish Patel in Development, Mac OS

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