Hi Blake
That does seem a bit mysterious so I listened to your tape a couple times and looked at the images carefully.
I have some more thoughts yet not sure I still have root cause.
Yet let me point out first a problem with how your have your Color Settings and that it may have set you off on the wrong path thinking the colors look good.
From the error message that you are getting when brining in the image into PS, the settings you have are when an image is coming in and there is a mismatch between the color profile of the image and your working space, then it is turning color management off. That means it is throwing away the Adobe Color profile and then displaying the image as if it were in your monitor working space (which for that monitor is close to sRGB).
So, you have Adobe RGB date being interpretted as sRGB which will change the colors more towards the desaturated end.
It is also my understanding that when you go to ACR or Lightroom and the image does not have an associated color profile - it will be interpretted as sRGB color space. That is why when you take the same now non color managed image into ACR, it looks pretty close to what you were seeing in PS --- they are both times being interpreted as close to sRGB in PS (your monitor profile) or as sRGB when in ACR through the Camera Raw filter. So while the image may have looked approximately right, it was really an Adobe RGB image be interpretted incorrectly as sRGB.
You also indicated that if you change the working space to Adobe RGB, it also looks bad as it did in ACR. You also said that taking the same image on your friends system it looks OK
So what does this tell me. It tells me that your image looks consistently bad whether directly in LR, ACR, or in PS when properly interpretted as Adobe RGB. All of this points to you have either a bad monitor profile or some color management setting is off somewhere in your monitor OSD or in the OS settings.
I thought it could be a setting in PS yet that would not explain why it was bad in LR as well.
So the fact that the image looked a bit better when you changed the working space I believe is a red herring and setting you off in the wrong direction. NOTE: I strongly suggest you set your color management settings to warn you when there is either a color mismatch or a missing profile to give you a heads up and set the default settings to preserve the color profile (your presently have it to turn color management off). That will at least avoid the red herrings and have your focus on finding the true root cause problem.
You could also reset preferences in PS and LR just to be safe yet I really doubt that is the root issue.
That's my best shot at it based on what I saw in your posts and the video.
Hope you get the problem tracked down soon
John Wheeler
