Photoshop Oversaturated External Monitor

[diazha]

I'm running into a weird over saturated issue with PS CC21. My color profile is the same as my macbook pro. This situation ONLY happens in PS. I usually hit "F" key to go to fullscreen then back and that usually knocks the color back to what it should be. Again, I don't think it's the monitor as the colors on that same file look fine in AI and ID. Anyone know what I'm talking about? I've attached two screen grabs where you see the difference. All I did was go from 

[Omar.Fathy]

Is the color profile in Ps is the same in Ai ?

[diazha]

Yep. All color profiles are the same Apple RGB

[davescm]

If I remember correctly, there was a bug around on Macs with dual screens where Photoshop would pick up the wrong monitor profile and that could be corrected by cycling Full screen (F). The monitor profile is used in Photoshop to convert the document colour values to those sent to the screen in order that the correct colour is displayed. That works well as long as the correct monitor profile is being used for each screen.

I don't use Macs but I've tagged our colour management expert  @D Fosse to see if he remembers the issue.

Dave

[D Fosse]

That's right and well summed up. This F-key glitch has been reported on Macs for many years.

In this particular case the setup is wrong to begin with ("All color profiles are the same Apple RGB"), so it's hard to tell what's going on. Using the same profile everywhere simply disables all color management.

diazha, you're not supposed to use the same profile, and certainly not Apple RGB which is obsolete and outdated. You should have a standard document profile (sRGB, Adobe RGB etc), and then you should have a custom monitor profile for each display, set up at system level.

In general, monitor profile handling on iMac/MacBook Pro with an external display connected seems increasingly problematic. The wrong profile ends up being used very often. It has previously also been reported from some Windows laptops in the same configuration. All of which points to a problem with how displays are assigned in the operating system/video driver - in other words, a manufacturer issue, not an Adobe bug. Photoshop uses whatever monitor profile it's handed from the operating system.

[diazha]

Thanks for that info.