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Question

Suspected bug in Color management for raw files (PSE2022, 2021 and ?2020)

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
March 13, 2022
2 replies
866 views

An important question for color management in any Adobe software is the choice of color space.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/using/setting-color-management.html

Precisely, while Elements does not offer all the advantages of its 'pro' cousins (like wide gamut including ProPhoto), it has always offered the choice between the limited, but universal and relatively foolproof sRGB and the wider color space Adobe RGB.

As you can see in the online help doc, an important answer has always been missing. When you choose to 'optimize' for printing, you choose the Adobe RGB wider space if no profile is alredy embedded in your file. The main situation is when you shoot 'raw' files. Raw files have no profile before the conversion. The conversion must know which output you want. That menu selection was not available in the PSE ACR interface contrary to the full ACR for Photoshop and Bridge. The explanation given in various forums is that the PSE ACR did fetch that info from the menu Edit >> Color settings in the editor. Selecting 'optimize for prints' produced a converted file in Adobe RGB.

My recent tests on PSE 2019 show that the feature works as before. For PSE 23021 and PSE 2022, whatever the choice of settings, the result is in sRGB.

Is there another way or a workaround to obtain aRGB space? Is it a bug or a deliberate feature change?

I have not read any question about that change, so I suspect that not many PSE users care for print quality or for exchanging quality files for other users with calibrated devices.

In a word: It's no longer worth shooting raw if you are limited to sRGB with Elements. If you have doubts about that, you can ask experts in the color management forum:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/using/setting-color-management.html

This topic has been closed for replies.

A

Anonymous

Printing ARGB color space with PSE 2022. It showa profile selected in PSE Image Color Profile.

Printing options in PSE 2022 are the same available in my full version of Photoshop CS 5.

MichelBParisAuthor

Legend

Printing ARGB color space with PSE 2022. It showa profile selected in PSE Image Color Profile.

Printing options in PSE 2022 are the same available in my full version of Photoshop CS 5.

By @25833805

Hi @25833805

Read my post carefully. What is specific to the Elements ACR plugin is that it does not offer a menu or an option to choose a color mode for the resulting conversion. In older versions, that shortcoming was managed from the options in the pixel editor, menu. When you click 'Open' in the ACR dialog, the ACR plugin reads the preference in your menu 'image >> color settings'. If you choose 'Always optimize for print', in older versions the conversions produces an aRGB mode.

In recent versions, you only get the sRGB mode.

Since converting from sRGB to aRGB within the pixel editor does not provide any quality advantage, the fact that the options in Elements are the same than in the Photoshop pixel editor don't help at all.

Still no change in the recent updates and no answer from Adobe. Is it a bug or a deliberate choice?

A possible explanation could be that to allow the workaround to update the ACR Elements plugin from the Photoshop full version, it was necessary to skip that reading of the preference option.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/kb/camera-raw-update-not-available.html

A

Anonymous

I fully understand the problem now, and after six and half hours of chatting with Adobe the matter is being reported to Element 2022 engineers and I will possibly get an email back within 24 hrs as to whether this issue is to be corrected or not.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

I see that on the mac side as well.

I guess someone from adobe will have to say whether it's a bug or not, but in the meantime it's still better to use camera raw files than jpeg/tiff since for the most part camera raw files contain far more pixel info that camera raw can pull from highlights/shadows than the equivalent jpeg/tiff from the camera.

MichelBParisAuthor

Legend

Many thanks for the feedback, Jeff.

You are right that there are still other very good reasons to shoot raw.

What we, users, can do to troubleshoot the issue is to find with which PSE version or PSE ACR version the issue appeared. I had the opportunity to test on different Wind 10 computers with different ACR versions, including some where I did use the workaround to install manually new ACR version for new cameras. Same results. I suspect that the PSE2020 version (uninstalled) also works the same.

Workarounds for me:

- using Bridge and my subscription for full ACR version (Photographer plan)

- using PSE2019 or older PSE versions.

Reminder for PSE users interested in choosing color modes: there is no loss when converting from aRGB to sRGB, but there is no advantage in converting from sRGB to aRGB, the color loss is already done.

Let's suppose that there is a difficulty for Adobe programmers to fetch the color space preference from the editor or to include a menu option in the PSE ACR interface, then it would be better for quality to convert to aRGB in all cases. The users would have to convert to sRGB if needed.

A

Anonymous

I suggest sRGB is used in PSE 2022 when choosing Optimise for Printing because most people don't have calibrated Adobe RGB monitors. It reduces the possibility of inconsistant colors between monitor and prints.

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