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So whenever I finish something in Procreate, I export it as PSD and make the final touches in Photoshop. At some point however I noticed that the colors went pale/grayish after opening the file in PS. The preview on my mac still shows the colors as normal for as long as I haven't opened it in Photoshop. Settings are RGB, proof colors turned off.
Note: This seems to have something to do with the layers, because when I export the same procreate file as a flattened PNG and open that in Photoshop, the colors remain bright (which isn't helpful as a workaround because I need to make edits to the layers).
Especially layer modes like linear dodge seem to get very pale and I'm not sure what I can do about it.
I had this for a while, have a new mac by now with newly installed photoshop and the issue remains, so this must be something in the default settings and restoring settings will not help...
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This is likely an ICC profile issue. Have you set an ICC profile/ working color space in Procreate?
Photoshop needs an embedded ICC profile in documents to know the provenance. If none is present then Photoshop will use the default working colour space as selected in "color settings".
Ideally the colour settings panel would be set to warn the user upon opening files with missing ICC profiles. Please post a screenshot of this panel on your Mac so we can advise. We need more detail than "settings are RGB" we need to know WHAT RGB specifically.
If there is no embedded ICC profile and you are not setting one up in procreate* then, in Photoshop, you'll need to go to edit> assign profile and choose one of the Photoshop working colour spaces - assessing image appearance.as you do that. I suggest starting with sRGB and AdobeRGB.
*maybe you can't set up images within a working colour space (as defined by an ICC profile)? some image apps do not use ICC color management, I had a quick look at Procreate and was unable to find information on setting an ICC based working colour space, or i=on embedding ICC profiles
Adobe apps use the embedded ICC document (image) profile and the ICC profile for the monitor display screen to calculate image values en route to the monitor display and thus provide an accurate on-screen view.
More here - about-icc-colour profiles
and here, what-is-colour-management
I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net - adobe forum volunteer - co-author: 'getting colour right'
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management
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@Danny51 If you type 'Procreate' into the search here on the forums, you'll find lots of info from previous discussions about the relationship between Procreate and Adobe apps too
I hope this helps
neil barstow, colourmanagement net - adobe forum volunteer - co-author: 'getting colour right'
google me "neil barstow colourmanagement" for lots of free articles on colour management
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Thank you, that was a very detailled response. I checked the color profiles in Procreate and Photoshop and they're both Display P3 - I tried assigning a new one in Photoshop and went through the list, but nothing in there comes close to what the preview outside of Photoshop shows me. When I choose a different profile in Procreate, the colors are being muted there.
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I actually just figued out what the problem could be: When I open the layered files in After Effects i can fix the issues because AE has "Add" and "Linear Dodge" as 2 seperate blending modes. In procreate, it's called Add and in Photoshop that gets converted to "Linear Dodge(Add)" - but it doesn't quite look the same. In AE however, it also gets changed to Linear Dodge but then I manually set it to Add and it looks exactly like it should.
What I don't understand is why AE has 2 different modes that work in different ways, while Photoshop only has one: Linear Dodge...
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That's a band-aid fix. This is a lack of proper color management in Procreate.