Photoshop converts photo from Adobe 1998 to Display P3

…should be Adobe RGB but when I click on a file on my desktop, the preview shows Display P3 so it's not Photoshop thats changing it but can't figure out where that profile is coming from.  Even when I select a preview of an image shot with a totally different camera 3 years ago it shows the same.  (screen shot below) Scratches head....

By @MarkWall41

I see this too on my Mac…selecting a raw file in the Finder, from a Canon camera released 15 years ago. reports Display P3, a color space not used at the time the camera was released.

(This might be the longest expansion of “it depends” ever written, because it really does depend on a lot of things…)

I think Display P3 is being reported by macOS using its built-in raw processing engine, and Display P3 is probably the default RGB color space of macOS (as it is now in iOS too). In other words, the Mac Finder is reporting Display P3 because that’s the default RGB color space it uses if you process the file through any Apple software (Apple Photos, Apple Preview…). It needs to assume something, since as is well established, raw files have no RGB color space because they have not yet been processed into RGB. So it assumes the OS default. But that doesn’t apply to how Adobe software will process it.

And Macs using an earlier version of macOS/Mac OS X probably would have reported that same raw file as sRGB, because that was the macOS default before Macs starting shipping with wide gamut displays.

I do not think that’s connected to why you’re seeing Display P3 in Photoshop, because Adobe applications use the Adobe raw processing engine.

To sum up things so far, you can see different readings about its color space which can all be simultaneously “true” for the same raw file:

• In the Mac Finder, it says Display P3 probably because you are using macOS to inspect an unprocessed raw file, so macOS assumes its default Display P3 color space.

• In Photoshop, the initial color space for a formerly raw file is set by what converted the file for Photoshop. If you used Camera Raw to convert it, the export color space setting there determines the color space. That can be different from the setting in Lightroom Classic.

• In Photoshop, the Save As/Save a Copy commands save using the same color profile that’s already embedded in an image. If an image doesn’t have an embedded color profile, Photoshop embeds the color profile of its current working space for that color mode. So a file will show Display P3 in Save As/Save a Copy if it either already has a Display P3 profile embedded, or (less likely) if it did not have one embedded but Display P3 is the RGB working space in Edit > Color Settings.

• In your camera, setting the color space to Adobe RGB typically affects a file in three ways: The color space if the camera was set to save JPEG files, the color space of a preview image it generates for a raw file, and in some cameras it sets the color space (and therefore the limits) of the RGB histogram and clipping warnings in the camera viewfinder. But as D Fosse said, this will not affect how the raw file converts in later software. Because the raw file doesn’t yet exist as RGB data, it cannot use any RGB color space (only its preview can).

So your file was set in the camera as Adobe RGB, but that doesn’t affect the actual raw data, or how the macOS raw engine interprets it by default, or how the Adobe raw engine interprets it by default.

The answer to your question involves tracing it back to the export color space setting in whatever software converted the raw file and passed it on to Photoshop, and then whether Photoshop Color Settings were set to change that color space to something else upon opening the file. The questions D Fosse asked could help clarify what happened at those stages.