point-n-shoot

Photos view VERY washed out when opened in Photoshop CS2. I am having a hard time making adjustments to my pics because I have to save the file and then open it in ACDSee to see what the REALLY looks like. Here is screen shot of a photo I took opened in PSCS2 and ACDSee (right)...



As you can clearly see, the PSCS2 photo appears desaturated compared to the same photo in ACDSee. This is NOT a problem with my camera...even stock professional photography (such as the ones that came with Adobe Lightroom) come out looking the same way...ALL photos do. Here is the profile I started with (I have since checked the boxes for profile mismatches)...



I've tried changing the color profile to Adobe RGB 1998 and I've even hit Ctrl+Alt+Shift when opening PS (to reset back to the default settings), and I've tried disabling Gamma in startup...nothing has worked. Could my software be corrupted? The only thing I haven't tried is calibrating my monitor with a hardware device like Monaco or Gretag/Macbeth.


I'm using Adobe PSCS2 (version 9.0.2) in Windows platform with an NEC MultiSync 22" CRT monitor on an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra graphics card (I've update the drivers for both my monitor and card) and my proc is an Intel P4-EE 3.2 GHz on an MSI-NEO mobo with 4-gigs of ram.

Thanks

ladyfinger007

Running Adobe Gamma should fix the problem. Using an hardware calibrator is a better cure, indeed.
Make sure that your sRGB profile is not corrupted.

It looks like the file is also in sRGB, from its title bar (no asterisk or sharp after the bit depth.)
In another message, you stated that Bridge is not installed. Do you have the creative suite? bridge is used to synchronize the color settings, that's maybe the issue...

See: http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps9_colour/ps9_1.htm for the whole nine yards.