Strange Color Picker Panel

Thanks for all the help guys. It’s only the DNG files that have the problem, and show P3 PQ as the profile.

Changing the Profile to sRGB fixes the Color Picker.

While the Color Picker appears to be unusable, it does not affect sampling from the image, and JPGs saved from a processed DNG file are fine.  Where it was causing a real problem was using Generative Fill.  Now there’s a modern issue to have!  BTW  The prompt was meaningless, and just something to demonstrate what the Ai does with the iPhone DNG file’s native profile.

Thanks again for the help.  Man, I HATE these small posting windows!!! 

The document that was causing the issue was taken with Adobe Project Indigo on an iPhone 16 Pro Max and was a 16bit DNG file.  dropping it to 8 bit made no difference.

You mentioned the Project Indigo camera app, which I enjoy using, so I tried one of my own images from that app. It took only seconds to reproduce the Color Picker you saw, see picture below.

As you said, changing the bit depth makes no difference. But…as the others were asking, I checked the document profile in the status bar, which I always display anyway. It says the document profile is Rec.2020 PQ (which stands for Perceptive Quantizer transfer function, as I just learned for the first time).

Converting to a color space we’re more used to, such as sRGB, changes the Color Picker back to something Photoshop uses are more familiar with. So it looks like it’s about the HDR-optimized color space + transfer function.

Rec.2020 PQ is one of the three color spaces offered by Adobe Camera Raw when opening a DNG file from the Project Indigo app. I’m guessing that those three were chosen by Adobe because Project Indigo DNG files are HDR-native, and those color spaces are much more familiar to video editors/colorists who have been working with HDR video far longer than most photographers have been working with HDR-native images. (Many photographers today still think of HDR only in terms of HDR merges, and not about HDR-encoded images straight out of camera like this. But some of the newest pro bodies are starting to offer single-frame HDR straight out of camera, just as HDR video cameras and some phone apps have been doing for a while.) 

It seems important to point out that all three of those HDR choices cause that “weird” color picker, even though the other two choices are the familiar sRGB and P3. This is why I think it ultimately isn’t about the gamut at all, it’s probably about that transfer function. Because if you use the non-HDR versions of sRGB and P3, of course the Color Picker looks the way we’re used to. What’s different is whether the color space is using that PQ transfer function.

The other way I was able to reproduce it is to start a blank document, and use Convert to Profile and choose a color profile with PQ in the name. That results in the unexpected Color Picker. But by now, we can see that under appropriate conditions, that Color Picker appearance might be expected after all.

​@Trevor.Dennis Can you show the profile at the bottom left of the document window, with a problem doc open (example below). Those in colour settings are just the defaults for new documents.

 

Dave

Yep. This is from Google’s Ai Summarizer, and seems to cover it.

One other thought - do you have ‘Precise color management for HDR display’ set in Technology Previews and are viewing on a display that is not HDR. If so, uncheck it.

Dave

I reset Preferences which made no difference, but creating a new document fixed it.  The document that was causing the issue was taken with Adobe Project Indigo on an iPhone 16 Pro Max and was a 16bit DNG file.  dropping it to 8 bit made no difference.  

It has the look of the Cutout Filter or Index color throttled down to four hue values.  It’s interesting that it’s just the colors in the panel that are so restricted.  Anyway.  It’s all OK now, although not in the project I was working on.