# Color spaces in Lightroom and Photoshop



## kag (Apr 20, 2010)

Hi,

I use Lightroom 3 beta and Photoshop CS4. Both use the ProPhoto RGB color space.

I also have a Spyder 3 Express calibration device and my monitor is using the calibrated profile (but I don't think this is relevant to my problem).

First, is it how it should be set up?

This being said, when I'm in Lightroom and use the "Edit in Photoshop" function, the image in Photoshop is slightly brighter than it was in Lightroom. It seems to have a slight red color cast as well. It's subtle, but still enough for my untrained eye to notice.

I've done countless Google searches, and most articles simply advise to use the same color space in Lightroom and Photoshop. But I already am!

Have anyone else experienced this? Is my setup wrong?


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## Big Mike (Apr 20, 2010)

Welcome to the forum.

When working with LR, I don't really think about the color space much.  Its default is ProPhoto, and I'm fine with that.  When I choose 'edit in...' and take the image into Photoshop, I think I leave it in ProPhoto as I'm just going to bring it back into LR anyway.  
When I export from LR, that is when I choose sRGB.

Double check your settings, to be sure of the color space the images are leaving LR with when you choose Edit in...I'm not sure why it would appear brighter, or different at all.


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## Garbz (Apr 21, 2010)

No you're not using the same. 

Lightroom has a working profile called MelissaRGB. It's based on the ProPhotoRGB but designed to work on a linear scale which is representative of the sensor data rather than a gamma of 2.2 like most other profiles. The only thing you can set in Lightroom is with what profile to export, and even then that doesn't introduce differences between Lightroom and Photoshop since regardless of what you set as the default working space of Photoshop since Photoshop by default will faithfully extract the profile of whatever image it is opening and run with it.

The only time you should EVER see a difference between Photoshop and Lightroom as a result of these settings is if you have a fancy screen with a wide gamut, and you edit in photoshop using sRGB, in which case Lightroom will compress the gamut as it sends the image to Photoshop (not a bad thing either, you just need to know how and why to use it in what way).

Now the differences between Photoshop and Lightroom can be introduced in a few ways. For some reason beyond my comprehension sometimes Lightroom does (used to?) not re-load my monitor profile from windows after I calibrated until I rebooted but I haven't seen this in a while now. 

The single biggest cause of a difference between Lightroom and Photoshop is that your Lightroom version does not correspond to the relevant CameraRAW version in photoshop.
So in otherwords I think you're boned for using a beta product. 

Jump back down and use Lightroom 2.7 with ACR 5.7, or don't complain about problems when you're using a product not yet released for production environments


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