I’ve been having a frustrating issue where when you copy, then paste an image to upload to a website, the colors would be changed.

This is primarily caused by the color settings being off in the system.

Here was the problem I was experiencing:

See the difference? The copy/pasted one’s colors were dull and desaturated, but the uploaded file was correct.

To fix this issue and ensure your colors are accurate between your desktop (offline) programs, and the web, you must first make sure you are using an sRGB color profile.

Without going into to much detail, sRGB is the default color space for most applications (browsers, desktop apps etc). Everything shown on the web is essential sRGB because most browsers ignore color profiles saved to images. Here’s more on this subject: http://petapixel.com/2009/09/17/why-you-should-probably-use-srgb/

I fixed this on OSX by doing the following:

1) Open System Preferences > Displays
2) Go to the Color tab, and change your profile to an sRGB color profile (I’m using sRGB61966-2.1)

3) Make sure any image editing software, such as Photoshop is set to the same color profile:

4) Restart your computer (in OSX, even after I change the color profile, the issue persisted until I restarted).

After doing everything above, now if you copy/paste images to upload to the web, they should show the same color as what you had originally on your computer.

Hopefully this saves someone some trouble as it had me pulling out my hair for awhile!