Illustrator & InDesign - colors are off

[benji-the-great]

Hi all - question on color:

I've recently noticed something in my Adobe software that's been giving me some grief. In both Illustrator and InDesign, I get colors showing up oversaturated and a little overbright. Photoshop however, doesn't seem to be having this issue. It also doesn't seem to show the colors wrong in the thumbnails - even from within Ai and InD, on the home screens - only in the workspace. I can't place when this started happening, but it's not always been this way (probably the past couple months or so, max). For example, my company's color is sort of a tomato, orangey-red (#D24727) (similar to the main color of Microsoft Office), but when used in Illustrator or InDesign, it shows up as full-on RED. Like fire-engine, cherry, candy-apple red. Pretty different from what it should be. In Photoshop though, it looks correct. In Ai & InD, I've tried adjusting the view, and basic things like that, but have avoided actual color profiles/settings because I've heard they are very hard to fix and not really to be messed with unless you are well versed in it, which I'm not. And it's not a RGB vs CMYK thing - that was one of the first things I checked. Anyway, it's not normally been like this until recently. Makes me wonder if I accidentally set something wrong somewhere, although if this were the case, I likely would have had to do it in both programs, correct? I've been looking online, trying to find a reason for this issue, but alas, nothing. Can anyone help? Any ideas? Considering that it regards my company's color, it's a pretty big deal. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Ben

[Test Screen Name]

How about the transparency blend space, which might be CMYK in either AI or ID but not PS?

[Kenneth Kawamoto]

How about the transparency blend space, which might be CMYK in either AI or ID but not PS?

The OP is talking about Hex colour discrepancy i.e. RGB - let's come back to your edge case scenario once this is solved, shall we?

[Ton Frederiks]

kennethkawamoto2  wrote

I asked:

What's your Color Settings like?

...because if the Color Settings of PS/AI/ID are identical, all should display the same colour in the same way.

Even if the color settings are synchronized, colors with the same values can display very different if the document has a different color profile. You can see the document color profile at the bottom of your document window.

In this example the same color values are displayed very different.

The color comes from a CC library and CC library colors are not color managed (unfortunately)

[Test Screen Name]

Colours specified in hex would, surely, be affected by the transparency blend space if they need to be blended.

I guess my question to the original poster is: do you see this effect on a brand new AI or ID file, with nothing else on the page? Or only on existing files?

[benji-the-great · Accepted solution]

UPDATE: I called Adobe Help last week, and they escalated the issue. They've since released an update and my colors now look better than ever across the board - InD, Ai & Ps all look exaclty the same now. It was clearly a bug issue but is now fixed. Just thought I'd share - Thanks!

[Ton Frederiks]

And what was the bug that was resolved?

[benji-the-great]

Not sure exactly - something to do with colors not displaying correctly on some machines.