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Known Participant
July 9, 2026
Question

Problem with display Color Management (too high saturation)

When viewing PDF documents containing colored objects/images on my wide gamut monitor using Acrobat Pro, objects and images have (very) oversaturated colors.

 

It looks like Acrobat Pro is ignoring my display profile and turns off display color management (see below)?

 

I was planning to use Acrobat Pro as tool in a book design project with a lot of photographs.

 

I have attached an example showing a PDF with a colored square using Photoshop and Acrobat Pro (screen dump, will not show true colors, but will illustrate the problem). See the attached JPEG below (Acrobat PRO to the left (oversaturated, not OK), Photoshop to the right (OK)).

 

All other apps that I use show the colors correctly for various PDFs. I have tried:

 

- Photoshop
- InDesign
- Bridge
- Edge browser (using Acrobat tech under the hood I think)
- Chrome browser
- Affinity

 

I have made some simple PDFs for testing: PDFs with a single rectangle shape all filled with the same color (a shade of red: R=200,G=50,B=50 for AdobeRGB, but the oversaturation seems to affect most/all colors) using the following color spaces:

 

RGB
    - AdobeRGB
    - ProPhoto
    - sRGB
CMYK
    - FOGRA39

 

The test files have all been created using Photoshop (I have also created PDFs using Bridge and InDesign earlier with the same results).
All the PDFs show up OK (identical, except for an almost unnoticeable change is saturation for the CMYK version) in all apps except Acrobat Pro. In Acrobat Pro they are also all identical but oversaturated.

 

I can see online that more people are having the same issue. Check these posts:

 

- "Colors are much too saturated in Acrobat"
- "Acrobat not displaying colors correctly"
- "Acrobat is showing wrong colors (ignores display profile)"
- "Colors in Acrobat pro (and Reader) are much too saturated" (acrobat.uservoice.com)
- "Colour Management incorrect in Acrobat DC Pro"
- ++

 

Different suggestions have come up. I have tried a couple with no luck:

 

- uncheck the "Enable Protected Mode at startup" and "Run in AppContainer" in "Security (Enhanced)" in Preferences
- try version 2.2 for the monitor ICC profile (I have tried both version 2.2 and 4.2 ICC profiles for my calibrated monitor)

 

Some observations:

 

As far as I can see Acrobat Pro takes the input profile into account: all the PDFs with different input color profiles show up identical (and oversaturated). It seems like Acrobat Pro ignores the output (display) profile and feeds my (single) wide gamut monitor with unmanaged display data.

 

A saw in a post that Acrobat may be using the GPU (via DirectX) for display color management and rendering (is this true?) and that this may cause problems. In my installation of Acrobat Pro, I cannot find any settings for GPU usage (should be somewhere in Preferences -> Page Display I think: "Use 2D graphics acceleration" or "Enable hardware rendering"). My GPU is used just fine in my other applications (Photoshop, ACR, Bridge, Topaz Gigapixel etc.).

 

---------------
System details:

Adobe Acrobat Pro version: 2026.001.21691 | 64-bit
Adobe Photoshop version: 27.8.0
Adobe InDesign version: 21.4.1 x64
Adobe Bridge version: 16.0.5.19
Microsoft Edge version: 150.0.4078.48
Google Chrome version: 150.0.7871.115
Canva Affinity version: Mid June '26 (4557)

Windows: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit
Version: 25H2
OS build: 26200.8655

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
NVIDIA Studio Driver, version: 610.62 Release date: Tue Jun 16, 2026

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
RAM: 64 GB

Monitor: Eizo CG2730 - 2560x1440 - Wide Gamut
Calibrated using Xrite i1 Display, ColorNavigator 7 (version 7.2.7.3)

 

Acrobat PRO to the left (oversaturated, not OK), Photoshop to the right (OK)

    9 replies

    jjohansonAuthor
    Known Participant
    September 30, 2026

    Hello ​@Anand Sri Bhattacharya 

    It is interesting to see that Photoshop currently has a similar/identical problem:

    - Photoshop Version 27.10:

    "P: Photoshop 27.10 (GA) - GPU-accelerated canvas rendering shows incorrect color (warm/red color cast) that does not match Camera Raw, Print Preview, exported files, or any external viewer"

    The behavior seems to be the same as observed in Adobe Acrobat: the output color profile (the display/monitor profile) is ignored so that images/documents are displayed incorrectly, especially on monitors with a wide gamut display.

    Could this be the same/similar issue?
    I have not found where I can disable the GPU in my Adobe Acrobat, so I am not able to check if turning it off fixes the issue.

    I have attached a couple of additional PDFs (one from the Adobe web site and one made with Affinity), both are displayed incorrectly.
    However, I guess that the problem is not related to the PDFs used, but with what is going on sending data to the display.

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    Meenakshi Negi
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    September 30, 2026

    Hi jjohanson,


    Thank you for sharing the information and the PDFs. We will check with the team if these two are similar issues. 


    Thanks,

    Meenakshi

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    jjohansonAuthor
    Known Participant
    July 23, 2026

    Hello,

    I have created log files: 601f7aae-5615-4e6a-8177-389d7c10afeb

    I have also created another PDF (using Photoshop) with an image showing the oversaturated colors in Acrobat Pro (screen dump, will not show true colors (but close), but will illustrate the problem):

    Acrobat Pro to the left (oversaturated, not OK), Photoshop showing the same PDF to the right (OK).

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    Anand Sri Bhattacharya
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    July 23, 2026

    ​@jjohanson Thank you for the logs. If you can share a sample PDF file through which you are able to reproduce the issue, this will help us in the investigation.

     

    Regards,

    Anand Sri

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    jjohansonAuthor
    Known Participant
    July 23, 2026

    I attached two PDFs and the screen dump show above with the log info:

    • testImageSmall-PS-2.pdf - (with the two images shown above)
    • test-sRGB.pdf - (with the red square from my initial post)
    • Screenshot-2026-07-23-104652-sRGB.jpg - (shown above)

    The two PDFs are attached here also:

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    Anand Sri Bhattacharya
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    July 22, 2026

    Hello ​@jjohanson 

     

    I hope you are doing well, and I am sorry for the delayed response. 

     

    Could you please share some PDF files and the logs from the machine? This will help us with ongoing invesigations.

    To collect the logs, please check this article: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/acrobat-diagnostics.html

     

    Thanks,

    Anand Sri.

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    Anand Sri Bhattacharya
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    July 9, 2026

    Hello @jjohanson


    I hope you are doing well, and thanks for reaching out and sharing all the details. We're sorry for the trouble you had.


    We will get this checked internally and will share an update soon. We may reach out to you for more information on this thread or via email.


    Regards,

    Anand Sri.

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