Color gone crazy—rgb saturation blown out and desaturated randomly

[JessicaFMoore]

Help! I've created an InDesign Document with RGB files placed into the file. It's magazine layout designed to be downloaded as a pdf and viewed onscreen, but printed as needed. 

Here's the problem: One image appeared desaturated. Rich skin tone had no color. So I set proof setup as Adobe RGB 1998, and it looked great. Scrolled down a few pages and scrolled back—totally desaturated again. Scrolled down and another image was saturated to the hilt—colors blown out and screaming on the screen. These are beautiful, high quality jpgs and should be just fine. 

So I reset the proof setup again, and now they look great. But all this color shifting is making me so nervous! I should have captured screen shots of the shifts, but they literally change with scrolling through the document and now I can't seem to recreate them. 

Mojave 10.4.6 
Macbook Pro Retina 2015

ETA: It did it again! I zoomed out and zoomed back in, and got this color shift! 

[John Mensinger]

The "proof setup" only affects what you see on your display when viewing your content the InDesign editing environment. It's really only a simulation; not what everyone who views your subsequently exported PDF will see.

[cinziamarotta]

Hi,

I think the issue is due to images colour profile doesn't match with document colour profile. The proof colours is a simulation of the final result. While scrolling pages, InDesign re-elaborates the preview and you can have a delay in the simulation. Set the InDesign document on Adobe RGB colour profile (if it's what you want to use) and apply the colour conversion when you export in pdf (output tab > convert to destination).

[JessicaFMoore]

Thank you both for that insight. What can I do to set up my document properly? When I started this document I chose Letter size web use. I would have thought that would be RGB, but the default proof setup seems to be CMYK. Is there something I'm missing in setup? 

[rob day]

Make sure your Transparency Blend Space is set to RGB. If the blend space is CMYK, and there are any transparent elements on the spread the preview will be in the document’s CMYK color gamut, which might explain the desaturation you are seeing. Also make sure Overprint Preview is turned off—Overprint displays RGB color in the document‘s CMYK space even when the blend space is RGB

Don’t use Proof Setup/Proof Colors with a document designed for screen display. If blend space is set to RGB, the preview will be correctly color managed via the assigned RGB profiles when Proof Colors and Overprint Preview are turned off.

Proof Colors is intended for soft proofing print output color before the final color conversion—the setup would always be to a CMYK or RGB output class profile, and only affects the InDesign preview simulating the device’s color.

Also, if you use AdobeRGB you have to consider what will happen to the color when it is viewed in a PDF reader with no color mangement. If the PDF reader has no color mangement the color usually defaults to sRGB, so if you can’t control your client’s viewer app, the best practice would be to export the PDF to sRGB.