Problem with color management, exported images too saturated

[phoerious]

Hi,

I have an image in Photoshop (CS5, Windows 7) which I wanted to export to PDF in order to print it but then I noticed that the colors varied significantly making the result unusable.

The image is composed in AdobeRGB and I'm working on a wide gamut monitor (Dell U2711) which I calibrated and profiled with a Spyder4.

In Photoshop the image contains a nice dull light brown but when I open the PSD in Illustator or InDesign or when I export it to PDF and view it in Acrobat there is way too much red in it. Below I have attached an example of how colors look like in Photoshop (left) and the rest of the system (right):

(note: this is an AdobeRGB JPEG, so viewing it on a normal gamut monitor might not show as much difference as there actually is)

This color mismatch is very extreme and I don't know what's causing the problems. I tried different profiles for my monitor (the one I created with the Spyder, the factory profile from Dell, the standard AdobeRGB profile, no profile at all etc.). While the color obviously changed a little the overall problem still persists: Photoshop shows the nice yellowish brown, all the other applications show a very reddish image. The difference is even noticeable quite extremely on my second monitor which is just a normal gamut monitor with a color range of about 73% of sRGB.

I also tried exporting it to a flat JPEG with no embedded profiles which makes the result a little better but the colors are still not accurate at all. This is very confusing as I don't know what the problem is and I also don't know if it's just Photoshop displaying wrong colors or if all the other applications just do bad color management.

It would be great if you could help me here.

Thanks.

P.S. This issue might be related to this thread http://forums.adobe.com/message/4178572#4178572 although I couldn't find any working solution there.

P.P.S. Opening the exported image/PDF in Photoshop, produces the desired colors again, so it's not a weird conversion causing the issues.

[phoerious]

I have filed a bug report. Maybe Adobe will respond and publish a patch which makes those applications aware of dual-monitor color profiles.

[emil_emil]

The defaults are all the same for all with the default Windows installation and you can change them if you like but as D Fosse said, they don't make any difference if you have a monitor profile assigned as default in the Devices tab. If  you remove all profiles from the Devices tab then these defaults will be used by the color managed  programs. Non-color managed programs are not affected by any of this.

[phoerious]

I thought it might affect how Windows handles images without assigned profiles internally such as the desktop wallpaper. But if you say it has no effect at all, then I don't care.

Thanks for your support.

[D Fosse]

Manko10 wrote:

I thought it might affect how Windows handles images without assigned profiles internally such as the desktop wallpaper.

Windows itself has no color management, it just makes profiles available for applications (including some, but not all, native Windows apps). All color management is application-level, not OS-level.

[phoerious]

I don't mean that it modifies the display of colors in other applications. I meant things like the desktop wallpaper or Windows apps such as the Photo Viewer which are obviously aware of color profiles in images. I thought those might be influenced by this setting if an image does not contain a profile.

[D Fosse]

Manko10 wrote:

What is the system wide default profile on your machine? Mine is "sRGB virtual device model profile"

Never mind that. It's just what the system defaults to if no other profile is present or assigned. This is the one that matters: