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michaljanata
michaljanata
Inspiring
November 21, 2025
Question

Something is wrong with Photoshop CMS

  • November 21, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 534 views

Not sure what's going on, but recently I have found out something is wrong with PS CMS.

I have my color settings synchronized to all Adobe apps, hardware selfcalibrated Eizo monitor (CN7). I dare to say I have everything setup correctly.
So I guess I should see colors same in Photoshop, InDesign and Acrobat. But that is not true.


I can see same image in Photoshop more green (cyan), than displayed in InDesign and Acrobat - they are displaying colors correctly and print is corresponding to what I see in InDesign and Acrobat.


When I try to edit photo to look good in PS, it is then too saturated in INDD and ACR, and also to saturated on prints. No matter if images are Adobe RGB or CMYK, still same problem.

Same data, same color values, synchronized color settings, but different look.

So I can't believe Photoshop much now.

Any idea what could be wrong? Do I miss anything?

    1 reply

    D Fosse
    Community Expert
    D FosseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 22, 2025

    No problems here (also Eizo / Colornavigator 7). EDIT - I have PS / Ai / Id / LrC installed and they all display correctly and identically.

     

    When these things happen, it's either a problem with the monitor profile, or a GPU bug. The conversion into the monitor profile is executed in the GPU, so those are two sides to the same coin. A problem in one can cause the other to fail, and it's not always easy to draw the line between them.

     

    While Eizo's monitor profiles are very reliable, there is one gotcha: It makes LUT/table based profiles by default. That is known to be problematic in some scenarios (for instance, they won't work at all in MacOS). It also makes version 4 profiles, likewise known to be a bit problematic.

     

    So first off, set CN to make matrix-based version 2 profiles, then make a new profile. In CN, matrix is known as Gamma (EOTF):

     

    The "reflect black level" checkbox should be off/unchecked. It's for applications that don't support Black Point Compensation.

     

    To test the GPU - which one are you using, BTW? - uncheck it in Photoshop Preferences. This shifts the display color management (the conversion into the monitor profile) back to the CPU in the traditional way.

     

    Do not change anything in Color Settings. That is not where the problem is.

     

    michaljanata
    michaljanataAuthor
    Inspiring
    November 24, 2025

    My CN settings has Reflect black leve unchecked, only difference is that I have selected 4.2 version.

    So do you recommend using older 2.2 version even for new Adobe apps?

     

    GPU is Radeon RX 550 and drivers seem to be actual according to AMD sotware check.

    D Fosse
    Community Expert
    D FosseCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 24, 2025

    Version 2 is always safer, so use that - but from what I can gather, the most problematic profile policy is LUT. It seems to give problems in a lot of scenarios. So set it to Gamma (EOTF).

     

    And then I thought I'd post some hard screenshots to back up my claims that I don't see any problems here. A blue sky is always first to highlight problems, so here they are. The blue is slightly muted to avoid clipping from ARGB to sRGB. This is one Adobe RGB file and one sRGB file, opened into Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator:

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