Adobe Creative Cloud has sophisticated color handling features. It gives you the opportunity to customize your Color Settings. One set of parameters you can adjust are the Profile Notifications – including Profile Mismatches, Missing Profiles, Ask When Pasting.
By default (North American General Puprose) these are unchecked. But the best practice from a color integrity perspective is to check the boxes, so you can know if you’re about to stub your toe against the coffee table of color.
For instance, one of the Color Settings provided by Adobe is the more sophisticated North American Prepress 2. These Color Settings replace sRGB as the RGB Working Space with the larger gamut AdobeRGB. They also turn on the Profile Notifications.
Profile Mismatch
In the example where your RGB Working Space = AdobeRGB and Profile Notifications are checked, if you open an image with sRGB embedded (typical with consumer photography or web images), you will see the following “Embedded Profile Mismatch” dialog box. In this instance, the images creator’s intent is known (sRGB), and your working space is AdobeRGB, so the correct action to take is to convert to your working space. While this will change the RGB values, it will not change the image’s color, and it will harmonize the image with the others in your working environment.
Missing Profile
In the instance where you open an image with no profile embedded, you will see the following “Missing Profile” dialog. This situation is a little trickier, because you don’t know the image creator’s intent. The best thing to do would be to contact the creator and ask them their intent. If their reply is “huh?”, then most likely they are using the Creative Cloud default of sRGB. This can be confirmed by asking them to check their color settings.
Or if you don’t have the ability to contact the image creator, it is most likely sRGB. This can be confirmed by selecting the first radio button “Leave As Is”, and then go to Edit / Assign profile and Assign sRGB. Then try the same on the missing profile image, assigning AdobeRGB. You can select whichever profile “looks better”. If the winner is sRGB, and your working space is AdobeRGB, the final step is to Convert document to working RGB.
