Confused color management problem with my calibrated LCD monitor

[afre (Alan)]

I don’t colour manage my workflow but I do have some thoughts that might be helpful.

1. Keep it simple. It appears that you have lots of software on hand and have done lots of tweaking. You might have settings, utilities, etc., running that interfere with each other. It could be time for you to clean up the clutter and make sure you don’t have something running at startup that you don’t need. You seem to have a lot of old stuff; e.g., Picasa is no longer supported.

2. Along the lines of #1, sometimes apps or app ecosystems try to be too “smart”. Start with and understand the basics before jumping in the deep end and trying to do everything at once.

3. Make your profiles and select them here:

4. It isn’t a good idea to place your profile in C:\. Place them where they belong, which I believe is C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color.

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PS
5. Use test images like @snibgo’s.

@snibgo

Here’s one example:

If the forum software hasn’t mangled it, the word “red” is RGB(0,95%,0) and “blue” is RGB(77%,0,7%), but the embedded ICC profile makes those pixel values into colours that correspond to the words. So it tests whether software respects profiles.

These days, most software is fine. Gimp correctly shows “red” in red, whether I keep the original colorspace or not. Photo Flow correctly shows “red” in red. RawTherapee 5.3, umm, well, I guess it isn’t designed to read non-raw images, or perhaps it has an option somewhere that I need to tick. But it shows “red” in green, which suggests it is ignoring the profile.