Color settings are so confusing and giving errors

Or, if there's no simple explanation, I'm fine with not learning it.

By @tturiano

There is no simple explanation, but you should not be fine with not learning it.

Color management has been there for the last 20 years and it won't go away.

You also want to have the warnings.

There are trainings on color management available on LinkedIn. They are not for free, but LinkedIn Learning is available via many public libraries.

Here is an introduction that covers the basics. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/color-management.html

…have been instructed by my printer to use Coated Gracol for the CMYK profile. I thought I should adjust the color settings globally to do this, but that seems to have been a mistake as I am getting mismatch error messages every time I open the documents (see attached). I guess I just don't understand the difference between embedded and working profiles.

By @tturiano

Yeah, this is a super confusing subject for everybody. Here is how I think of it.

An embedded profile is a profile that is actually included inside a document. Three documents can carry three different embedded profiles. The nice thing about embedded profiles is that there is no ambiguity. The profile in the document is the profile it uses. So in a color-managed workflow, it’s a lot safer and more reliable to embed color profiles in documents.

A working profile is the profile that’s currently in effect for a document. If a document has an embedded profile, then that’s the working profile for that document. So what’s the difference? The difference comes in when you open a document that does not include an embedded profile. Because it has no profile, what color space is it using? Answer: The one set as the “working space” in Color Settings. (“Working space” is the same as “working color profile.”)

Another way to look at that is the working spaces set up in Color Settings are basically defaults. Which means two things. The first is that as a default, the working space gets used is when you start a new document. If the CMYK working space is Coated GRACol, and you create a new CMYK document, it will be CMYK GRACol from the start.

The other thing is that the working space usually isn’t used if a document already has a color profile. For example, if I have 27 documents in FOGRA39 CMYK and the CMYK working space is Coated GRACol, the documents open as FOGRA39 CMYK. They already have that profile embedded, so they don’t need to fall back to the default (working space) profile.

What can change that last paragraph are the settings in the Color Management Polices in Color Settings. The defaults are set up for more common workflows. But for example, if you work for a company that requires all opened RGB documents to be in Adobe RGB, then the Color Management Policy for RGB would be set to Convert to Working RGB, and the RGB Working Space would be set to Adobe RGB. That means an opened document’s embedded profile (such as sRGB or P3) won’t be preserved, but instead that document is converted to Adobe RGB.

The color mismatch messages are very annoying, and pop up only if a box is enabled in the Profile Mismatches option group. You turn them on if you or your company don’t want color space conversions to happen blindly, you want to know that a document isn’t matching the working space. The problem is, if you open 27 files and they all don’t match the working space, you get warned on each and every one. Adobe has implemented the warnings in a way that stops everything cold until you figure out which button to click. (They designed Color Settings over 20 years ago, and have not revisited it to be more flexible.)

You will find that the Adobe default Color Settings presets generally have the warnings turned off, because it is more common to not try to convert every document as it opens, and instead respect their embedded profiles and convert them all on output.

There are still some workflows where all files have to be in a specific RGB or CMYK color space, like your printer requiring Coated GRACol. If the mismatch warnings drive you nuts in Illustrator, you could turn them off and instead, make sure your production checklist includes verifying the color space of each document (using the status bar, or Window > Document Info). If it is not Coated GRACol, then first make sure File > Document Color Mode is CMYK Color, and then choose Edit > Assign Profile and assign Coated GRACol (this may change the appearance of colors already applied).

It seems there must be something in the document that is embedded with an RGB profile...which is causing the mismatch. How do I find out what that item is? I have tried selecting everything at once and run the Edit>Convert to CMYK function, but still get the error messages.