Image preview incorrect in photoshop 2025

Question

Hi, I've been a photographer for the last 16 years. Using adobe products the entire time and i've never come across this issue. My process is importing raw images from my camera, pulling those into photomechanic for a quick cull, then pulling the raw images into Lightroom. In light room, I do all of my color calibrations and any exposure problems are fixed. I then export them as jpeg with the sRpg color profile. From there, I usually run them through a photoshop plug in that does skin softening for me. I have it set up as an action.. and the only thing I do in photoshop is delete background people or add magical looking elements into some of my children's photography. 
Since the update, I am having an issue. The image leaving  light room as a jpeg is opening extremely warm in photoshop.  While in photoshop, if I open Camera raw the image looks exactly like it did in light room.  Exporting the images to shoot proof and downloading them on a different computer. They look exactly like the images in light room..
 
The only place they do not look the same is photoshop. I spent six hours today going back and forth with chatgpt has it tried to assist me in making sure that all of my color profiles across all applications are the same. They are all set to the same color profile. It had me walk through deleting my caches.. it had me delete photoshops settings for photoshop to reinstall them. My screens are calibrated, it cannot be the screen. Since the image looks perfect on light room and perfect in camera. Raw, and then it looks perfect on my cell phone and on our different desktop. It only looks stupid in photoshop. 
I have finally left the office today so I'm posting this from home with no screenshot, but can post tomorrow with something if it'll allow me to.
I work on a gaming desktop pc.  
 
Help please.

D Fosse · Answer

This is most likely a defective monitor profile.

You misunderstand what a monitor profile is and what a calibrator does. A monitor profile is a standard icc profile, just like any other icc profile. The calibrator does two things: first it makes some adjustments to the monitor - low precision - and then it writes a profile describing the monitor in that calibrated state - high precision.

Photoshop/ACR/Lightroom use this profile in a standard profile conversion, from the document color space into the monitor color space. This is done on the fly, as you work. This way the file is correctly represented on screen.

Even though it all ends up in the same monitor profile, the source color spaces are very different. So the actual conversion is different, and that's why it may fail in one and still work in the other. In ACR, it's a custom linear gamma color space with ProPhoto primaries; in Photoshop it's a gamma encoded standard color space.

In fact - if two color managed applications display differently, that's a red flag. That's evidence that the conversion is not executed correctly. That is usually because the profile is bad.

The actual conversion into the monitor profile is executed in the GPU, so a buggy driver could also cause the conversion to fail. These are two sides to the same coin: a problem in one can cause the other to fail.

What calibrator are you using?

Oh, and to be clear : the color spaces do not need to match! That's a common misunderstanding. The whole point of color management is that color spaces do not need to match. They only need to match if there is no color management or icc profiles.

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