Color Management Policies: Missing Profiles: Ask When Opening is Greyed Out

[HSM2022]

I have a question about an important option being greyed out in PS CS6; I am not sure how to make it an active option. The panel for the Edit: Color Settings has a Color Management Profiles section with the option to Ask When Opening for applying a Color Profile to images with Missig Profiles, but it is greyed out. See the image attached below. The red dot shows what I am refering to. This would be an important option to have available, since it would allow me to add a Color Profile to the many images that I import from another DCC that have no embedded Color Profile. As to why it is greyed out, I do not see options that would change its status, except that the closest option would seem to be changing the Color Management Policies: RGB from Off to one of the other options, but those options are also greyed out. How can the Ask When Opening option be made available?

 

[HSM2022]

The image attached below shows the RGB state options greyed out. I read the explainer on the Ask When Opening option, and it says it is available when the relevant source is not set to Off. So, the question now is how do I get the RGB state options to not be greyed out?

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

You have your working RGB set to the display profile. Never do that, the display profile has no business here.

Set it to a standard color space like sRGB or Adobe RGB. Then set Policies to "Preserve Embedded Profiles".

[HSM2022]

Reading the on-line Adobe User Guide, I see it says in the Color Management: Color Settings: Color Working Spaces section that "Working spaces also determine the appearance of colors in untagged documents." So I take that to mean that when the Color Settings panel is set to Monitor Color, the Missing Profiles option, aka for untagged files, is missing because the file has not alternate Color Profile option except to be set to the Monitor Color working space. Actually, come to think of it, I'm surprised that option even exists for any of the other Work Space settings, because it follows natural logic that untagged image files will have no option except to use the currently defined Work Space setting. Thank you for drawing my attention to that and provoking further thought. So, the "problem" is no problem as it turns out.

I suppose the Photoshop GUI could be updated to exchange "Missing Profile: Ask When Opening" for "Missing Profile: Alert When Opening", because there's no change to be made at the time yet the user might want to know the file's not tagged with a Color Profile.

[HSM2022]

This brings up the question of what the difference is between Monitor Color: Monitor RGB and North American Web/Internet: sRGB options. Isn't the intent of both options to have the image appear digitally to others on their computer screens in the same colors as it appeared to you on your own computer's screen where the image file was prepared by tagging it with a Color Profile that translates the image colors for different hardware destinations? If so, since the file gets tagged with the Color Profile from either Work Space option, won't it appear to others as it appears on one's own computer in either case? Or do those two options differ in Color Space gamut used in the Work Space? Is that the difference and why there are two options for digital "printing"?

[D Fosse]

The working space can in principle be set to any valid RGB profile on your system. That includes the monitor profile. That doesn't mean you should do it.

By general consensus we have a handful of standard RGB color spaces: sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB, and lately Display P3 needs to be added to that list. Any file should be created in one of these to avoid confusion and anarchy.

There's only one way to make sure the image is correctly represented. First it needs to have an embedded profile that defines the RGB numbers unambiguously. Without an embedded profile, the numbers are undefined and can mean anything at all. Untagged is not an option. Never work with untagged files. The embedded profile is intended to override the working space (hence "preserve embedded profiles").

Then you need to have a valid monitor profile on the system. A valid monitor profile is one that accurately describes the display in its current and actual state. This profile is managed in the operating system, not Photoshop. Photoshop just loads and uses whatever monitor profile it gets from the operating system.

A monitor profile should be made with a calibrator/sensor. After it has finished the calibration, it measures the display's response and writes an icc profile based on that measurement. This profile describes the monitor's  native color space, just like any profile is a description of a color space.

The monitor profile has much higher precision than the calibration, using many more parameters.

Then the document color space is converted into the monitor color space, on the fly, as you work, and these corrected numbers are sent to screen. This way the file is correctly represented on screen.

Keep track of document profile here: