PS shows pics over saturated

[Excavator]

Photoshop is showing pictures about 30% more color saturated than IrfanView. Not doing anything to the pics yet, just opening them up.
I messed with some settings but I'm totally lost and don't want to mess it up.

Any ideas???
I don't even know what to google to try and fix it.

All I did was install PS and open a .jpg. I didn't change any settings or anything, it's running like this out of the box.
Here is my system:Lian Li PC-V2100B * Enermax Galaxy 1000watt PSU * Intel D975XBX2 BadAxe2 * Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 Conroe 2.93GHz 4M shared L2 Cache 1066FSB (running at 3.46MHz) * Artic Cool Freezer7pro * 4GB Corsair PC2-8500 * 2 150GB Western Digital Raptors in RAID0 * WD SATAII 250GB w/16meg cache * Plextor 716A SATA DLDVD Burner * Creative 16xDVD/Rom * XFX 7950GX2 with 1GB DDR3 running one ACER 24" AL2416W widescreen and one 20.1" Vuesonic VP201b LCDs * DTV/DSL Internet connection at 10 meg per/sec down and 768K per/sec up

[VIPStephan]

I experienced similar things where, when I exported a PSD (saved for web) it would lose a lot of color depth and didn’t look good at all anymore. It might be the RGB/CMYK settings but I haven’t really figured out what it was. What I just did was to flatten the image, saving it (still as PSD), and to open those PSDs in Fireworks and they looked alright there so I could export them.

That’s probably not the best method but I’ve been out of Photoshop for too long and didn't know how to help myself. And I just had to install it because PSDs I got were crashing my Fireworks (worked after saving them again - probably because they were converted from Illustrator files)).

[Excavator]

Hello VIPStephan,
It was the RGB settings but not where I thought -
I had to specify BOTH Windows and PhotoShop to use the right colorspace.

in Windows (I'm in Vista so this may be different for you):

goto Start/Control Panel/Color Management
make the sRGB Color Space Profile.icm default

In PhotoShop:

goto Edit/Color Settings
under RGB select Adobe RGB (1998)



Everything looks great now - PS and Irfan display images very close to the same and that's what I need. I use Irfan to view pictures because it's very fast, I use PS to edit them though and the 2 programs need to display the same for that to work.