Confused about colour management! Does 'convert to profile' do anything?

Thank you for all your help! 🙂

I have been using the following settings:

Lightroom: External editing > Edit in Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 > file format = TIFF, color space = Adobe RGB, bit depth = 16 bits.

Photoshop: Colour settings > Working spaces = Adobe RGB, Colour management policies = preserve embedded profiles (indicate profile mismatches/ missing profiles = all ticked).

My windows 10 Advanced Display settings are:

Bit depth = 10 bit, Colour format = RGB, Color space = Standard dynamic range (SDR)

I noticed that my images looked different in Lightroom from Photoshop and assumed this was because I was editing/viewing images in Prophoto in LR and then exporting to Photoshop as Adobe RGB. I decided to test this by exporting to Photoshop as Prophoto. The resulting image looked vastly different in Photoshop compared to Lightroom (less vivid). If I go into LR Preferences > Performance and uncheck 'use graphics processor' my image looks the same in both Photoshop & Lightroom (and similar/identical to Flickr and on other screens). Could this be the solution?? I’m not interested in hyper-saturating my image colours, just in achieving colours which are as exact to real life as possible and consistent across colour-managed devices/programs.

Switching my monitor from Adobe RGB mode to sRGB mode using the OSD Hotkey Puck still results in noticeably duller, less saturated images in all these programs - I think that I might need to calibrate my monitor for sRGB mode separately?

Thanks again, I'm trying my best to digest all this new information!

Dave gave you the complete answer, and very precisely summed up in these two lines:

"Colour management is simple to use provided the document profile is correct, always save or export with an embedded profile, and the monitor/printer profile is correct. All the math is done in the background."

As a quick and instructive hands-on exercise, have your histogram float on top of an image while converting and assigning a different profile. Watch what happens with the image, and what happens with the histogram. Use two very different profiles like sRGB and ProPhoto, to immediately bring the point home.

Hi

First the short answer. Save your master PSD files with layers etc in your chosen wider colour space i.e Adobe RGB.  When exporting a copy for web use, use File export and tick both Convert to sRGB and Embed Color profile.

Doing that anyone viewing using color managed software and a profiled monitor will see the colours as you exported them. Anyone viewing using a monitor with colours close to sRGB but without colour management will see something incorrect but close. Anyone viewing on a wide gamut monitor without color management will see incorrect colours but that is their problem not yours.

This might help you with a bit of background:

Colour Management simple explanation

Digital images are made up of numbers. In RGB mode, each pixel has a number representing Red, a number representing Green and a Number representing Blue. The problem comes in that different devices can be sent those same numbers but will show different colours. To see a demonstration of this, walk into your local T.V. shop and look at the different coloured pictures – all from the same material.

To ensure the output device is showing the correct colours then a colour management system needs to know two things.

1. What colours do the numbers in the document represent? 
This is the job of the document profile which describes the exact colour to be shown when Red=255 and what colour of white is meant when Red=255, Green = 255 and Blue =255. It also describes how the intermediate values move from 0 through to 255 – known as the tone response curve (or sometimes “gamma”).
Examples of colour spaces are (Adobe RGB1998, sRGB IEC61966-2.1)
With the information from the document profile, the colour management system knows what colour is actually represented by the pixel values in the document.

2. What colour will be displayed on the printer/monitor if it is sent certain pixel values?
   This is the job of the monitor/printer&paper profile. It should describe exactly what colours the device is capable of showing and, how the device will respond when sent certain values.
   So with a monitor profile that is built to represent the specific monitor (or a printer profile built to represent the specific printer, ink and paper combination) then the colour management system can predict exactly what colours will be shown if it sends specific pixel values to that device.
   
   So armed with those two profiles, the colour management system will convert the numbers in the document to the numbers that must be sent to the device in order that the correct colours are displayed.
   
   

So what can go wrong :

1. The colours look different in Photoshop, which is colour managed, to the colours in a different application which is not colour managed.
   This is not actually fault, but it is a commonly raised issue. It is the colour managed version which is correct – the none colour managed application is just sending the document RGB numbers to the output device regardless without any conversion regardless of what they represent in the document and the way they will be displayed on the output device.
   
   
2. The colour settings are changed in Photoshop without understanding what they are for.
   This results in the wrong profiles being used and therefore the wrong conversions and the wrong colours.
   If Photoshop is set to Preserve embedded profiles – it will use the colour profile within the document.
   
   
3. The profile for the output device is incorrect.
   The profile should represent the behaviour of the device exactly. If the wrong profile is used it will not. Equally if the settings on the device are changed in comparison to those settings when the profile was made, then the profile can no longer describe the behaviour of the device. Two examples would be using a printer profile designed for one paper, with a different paper. A second example would be using a monitor profile but changing the colour/contrast etc settings on the monitor.
   The monitor profile is set in the operating system (in Windows 10 that is under Settings>System>Display >Advanced) which leads to a potential further issue. Operating system updates can sometimes load a different monitor profile, or a broken profile, which no longer represents the actual monitor.

Colour management is simple to use provided the document profile is correct, always save or export with an embedded profile, and the monitor/printer profile is correct. All the math is done in the background.

I hope that helps

Dave

First thing to bear in mind is that once you get into colour management, you will realize that only colour managed apps show colours right. So don't go saying, it looks good in Photoshop but bad in Windows... what that means is that in Windows you happen to be using an app that isn't colour managed. Most are not, and it's getting worse, not better.

Another thing to bear in mind is that "rich and saturated" isn't the same as "accurate". The people who sell TVs and monitors know that people like vibrant images and consider them better; go to a TV store and see how over-saturated everything is.