Saturation issues

[Jerejk]

I hope that I can explain this so that everyone understands my problem and can help me.

I am using photoshop cc on a windows 10 machine and have just recently started having these issues. I am working on some portraits that have been shot with a Canon 5D2 and the images look good in the bridge and also in photoshop. Without making any adjustments other than resizing the images they look good/normal when uploaded and viewed from my desktop and my laptop. But, when I view them in any mobile device they look extremely over saturated. In order for them to look right on a mobile device I have to reduce the saturation by -30, but then they look washed out on my laptop and desktop.

Today I decided to put both the straight out of the camera and the desaturated images on a side by side image. I created a new document and drug both to the new document. That action alone desaturated both of the images. I am inserting a image to show what happened when I tried to do the side by side. The image on the left is straight out of the camera, the next image (center) is the same image just moved to a new document, and the third image (far right) is the desaturated image that I dragged to the new document (is lost saturation as well when moved to the new document).

I am working in RGB 8 bit color in all of them.

Thanks for any help.

Jere

[gener7]

Have you checked the Document Profile in the Status Bar on these images? What are you seeing? sRGB, Untagged, or Adobe RGB?

Do you have your Color Management policies set up to warn you of mismatches?

[D Fosse]

Jerejk  wrote

I created a new document and drug both to the new document. That action alone desaturated both of the images.

This can only happen when color management has been disabled. Something has been turned off or changed here. With everything working as it should, the colors will be converted in the paste and remain unchanged.

Reset everything in Color Settings to defaults. The easiest way to do that is to pick one of the "General Purpose" presets.

Having policies set to "Convert to Working RGB" is not recommended  - especially if that working RGB is sRGB. This will permanently shave data off every non-sRGB file opened. Always use "Preserve Embedded Profiles". That's the way Photoshop is intended to work.

The camera-processed jpeg can not be compared with the ACR processed version! They will not, and are not supposed to, be the same!

[gener7]

My wrong. I've deleted that part, D. Thanks for the correction.

Gene

[D Fosse]

Yes, no mercy on that point...

The "convert" option looks innocent, but it's a time-bomb if you worry about data integrity. I can see instances where it makes sense, if you're working for web output exclusively - but even so I think you should only activate that option for a limited and specified time.

The only policy that will leave your files undamaged in all scenarios is "preserve embedded". This is the safe option.

Just as a general observation, people put far too much importance on Color Settings - and that's why they go in and change things when they see inconsistencies. And that's when they really get in trouble! Nothing in Color Settings will solve anything - it will only mess things up beyond repair.

If you have color problems, color settings is not what causes it - unless you change something there! Leave it alone. The problem is somewhere else - usually applications that don't do color management at all.