Integrity of Scientific Imagery: Photoshop v.4 versus v.5

Extract

Having installed Photoshop 5 after using version 4 for some time, I think that all scientists who believe that the integrity of their imagery is important, understand what Photoshop 5 brings with it: the issue of "color space" or color profiles". Whereas users could rely on the integrity of their image being retained with Photoshop 4, this changes with version 5, and in some cases rather severely. For example, a image bitmap which might represent elemental spatial distribution data should be considered to have a gamma of unity. Photoshop 4 would represent this data for editing via the display monitor's gamma compensation only. That is, the integrity of the pixel values would remain and visual compensation happens between data and display. Photoshop 5, on the other hand, will modify pixel values in accordance with either a desired "working" color space or an anticipated "target" color space.