Photoshop overriding Windows color management?

[OscarinCB]

Hello,

A few weeks ago Photoshop started behaving incorrectly. This is a random error, it happens 50% of times.

After PS splash window goes away, and the project panel of PS appears, my monitor colors all wash out and brightens.

I have PS configured to show the UI in the darkest setting, but right from the start, all color changes to a bright milky palette.

As time goes by, PS starts to get darker gradually, until it becomes the real darkest setting.

It is not just the UI that changes though, all color on every windows app changes. Going bright when PS launches, to dark again, gradually. I can see color shifting for about 2 or 3 seconds until it goes back to normal. Like the program was "getting ready" much like we have to heat cars for a while before driving in cold environments.

Some actions, like certain apps overlaying the screen, seems to clash with this PS error and everything shifts again back to bright colors only to darken again a few seconds later.

I can't find an explanation for this, I tried playing with the color management options but nothing works definitely.

What bothers me the most is that I don't have any certainty of which color space is correct now and if it will get overridden without me noticing at some point.

Anyone experiencing the same problem? Share some insight, please!

[D Fosse]

This has nothing to do with Photoshop. Adjusting brightness according to screen content is a "helpful" function added by laptop manufacturers, and laptop settings is where you need to go to stop it.

And just to correct the thread title, color management is done entirely by the application - all Windows does is provide profiles when applications request them. IOW there is no "Windows color management".

[OscarinCB]

Thanks D Fosse,

Just to clarify, I am not working on a laptop. Here I leave my specs:

Windows 10 pro up to date

Ryzen 5 1600

16gb 3000mhz corsair RAM

Corsair MP500 240gb PCI SSD

Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4gb Phoenix

MSI x370 SLI plus

BenQ BL2420PT

I've been working with PS on this machine since March this year and I started having this issue a couple of weeks ago. Brightness and color on my monitor stays unchanged all the time. Launching PS triggers this behavior and quitting PS brings everything back to normal.

[Mylenium]

You possibly have some application-specific settings in your graphics driver related to acceleration functions. Check that stuff in your nVidia control panel.

Mylenium

[johanc080260]

Photoshop 2021 overriding Displaycal profile launcher

Hi,

I'm having the same problem.
Lightroom works fine, only Photoshop is causing troubles.

Greetings,

Johan

[D Fosse]

We need to be clear on the actual facts here. Photoshop has nothing to do with the calibration or calibration loader. It couldn't "override" it even if it wanted to.

What Photoshop uses is the monitor profile, which is something else. The profile is a standard icc profile, and a profile doesn't do anything. It's a map, a description of a color space. The monitor profile is a description of the monitor's behavior in its current and actual state. In other words; in its calibrated state.

But the profile has a much higher precision level, using many more parameters, than what is possible to achieve with calibration alone.

People tend to mix up calibration and profiling, mostly because they're performed in one go by the calibration software. First the monitor is calibrated, then the profile is written describing that calibrated state in detail. The profile is then used in a standard profile conversion, from the document profile and into the monitor profile. These corrected numbers are sent to screen.

So armed with that knowledge, perhaps you can better describe what's actually happening here. Post side by side screenshots.

It could be that the profile is bad/not written to icc spec. One thing you can do to avoid that, is to make version 2 and matrix-based profiles. Version 4 and/or LUT-based profiles are often problematic because they're much more complex (but with little actual benefit).

DisplayCAL is complicated software with a lot of options. In general, keep it simple. Avoid the "specialist" options, they usually aren't necessary. Reduce the number of measured patches. You'd think the more the better, but actually the opposite is true.