Problem with colour profiles

[Exspextations]

Not sure if this is the correct community, but grateful for any tips or suggestions on how to solve my colour profile problem.

I am using Photoshop Elements version: 17.0 (20180830.m.125874) x64 with the latest version of Windows 10, an Acer monitor and an nVidia graphics card - NB I have tried letting the graphics card control the colour settings, but this does not appear to have any effect on impages displayed.  As far as I can, all hardware and software is using Adobe sRGB colour profile.

I am really struggling with getting the correct colour balance for photos. The embed colour profile is Adobe sRGB, but the colours do not look correct in PE - if I correct them using photoshop to what looks acceptable, then they do not look right using other software that is set-up for Adobe sRGB, on my Samsung tablet or Panasonic TV.  The attached screen shot shows how different application, i.e. PE, Windows Photo app and NCH Photopad displaying the same slide - non is ideal, but the NCH app at least displays the photo with colours the closest to the original slide from which the photo was scanned using a Nikon LS 5000 scanner with Adobe sRGB as the colour profile and to those seen on my Samsung tablet and Panasonic TV, albeit a bit washed out - PE is probably the furthest from it.

I know that colour profiles can cause havoc if they are not correctly selected across hardware and software, but I had thought that this had been pretty much sorted these days and I am at a bit of a loss as to what is causing the problem or how to correct it.

Grateful for any assistance, suggestions anybody can give.

Many thanks in advance,

Expextations

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

First of all, there is no such thing as "Adobe sRGB". It's either sRGB or Adobe RGB. But that's probably not the issue here anyway.

Here's the important thing: Some applications are color managed and will use these profiles, and some applications are not color managed and will just ignore them. You need to find out which is which. The former will be right, the latter will be wrong.

In that screenshot, Windows "Photos" in the middle is not color managed. Ignore it. What you have on the right I have no idea.

Color management always requires two profiles, a source and a destination. The profile is a map. It is used to recalculate the numbers on the fly, preserving visual appearance in the destination color space. The source profile is the document profile, sRGB, Adobe RGB etc. The destination profile in this case is your monitor profile. Assuming the monitor profile is accurate, Photoshop will always display the file correctly.

The monitor profile is a crucial component in the Photoshop ecosystem. The only way to have full control of it is to use a calibrator. For serious work you need to have one. If not, you will probably get manufacturer profiles distributed through Windows Update, and these profiles are very often inaccurate or defective.

To test that, replace your current monitor profile with sRGB IEC61966-2.1, or Adobe RGB if your monitor is a wide gamut model (you need to check that). That will not be entirely accurate, but it will be better than a broken profile, and it will confirm whether the profile actually is broken.

Relaunch Photoshop when done, it loads the monitor profile at application startup:

[Exspextations]

Apologies for the delay in getting back, but I have been doing a bit of research based on your advice and for the over use of 's' prefix - not sure why I typed Adobe sRGB.

I discovered that my monitor was indeed set to the wrong ICC profile - my monitor is not wide gamut so I have now changed the ICC profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 as you recommended.  The colour in photoshop elements is now pretty much what I expect and identical to that in the Silverfast scanning sofware I use - previously the image displayed in PE post-scanning was different to that in the scanning software.

The image in PE post-scanning is now identical to that in the Silverfast app  that I use for scanning old colour negatives and slides.  After a bit of research I found FastStone and XnView that are colour controlled - I have downloaded both and, once colour control was set in both apps, the images they display are pretty much identical to those in PE.  I will use these in future for viewing images in the Windows environment.

It is clear that my monitor is probably not ideal for photography, but buying one that is is going to have to wait until the piggy bank is fuller.  In the meantime I am looking at buying a colour calibration tool to get the most out of my existing monitor - probably SpyerX Pro or XpRite i1Display Pro once I can sort out which meets my needs closest.

Once again many thanks for your advice which has allowed me to solved the immediate problem - I will clearly have to keep a regular eye that my monitor and printer ICC profiles are set correctly.