# colour profiles and PS actions



## michelleturnbull84 (Jul 29, 2014)

Hello, 

I really hope someone can help me because i am at my wits end and totally confused.  
Literally, in the last week, my lightroom and photoshop have started playing up. 
Firstly, I noticed that some of my images, after being processed in lightroom then photoshop (photoshop being the final stage therefore saving image out of photoshop) they were not saving with the colours that I had processed them to - they got this sickly looking grey wash over them, especially when they were sent via email, or uploaded to the web.  I discovered this was the colour profile causing this, with photoshop saving them as 'ProPhoto RGB' and if I then opened the image up in PS again and converted the profile (to sRGB IEC61966-2.1) the colours are perfect, both with web upload and email and anything else I use it for.  I have tried changing the settings in lightroom (preferences - external editing) but photoshop still seems to automatically convert the images to 'ProPhoto RGB'.  While this is obviously solvable by reopening the image in PS and converting the profile, I can't understand any this has suddenly started happening when it has never been an issue in all my 2-3 years of using the programs before, and when i am editing a whole wedding photo shoot, reopening each image to convert the profile is just not doable.  

The second issue, which I can only imagine is related as it has only cropped up over the same time and I have never experienced it before, 
is i do my usual basic processing in LR, then edit in PS, where I run actions over the images and tweak them - but suddenly, any balck and white image I send through to PS to run actions over, the action starts the first few steps, then crops up with an error 'Could not complete the command because that content type is not supported for this color mode.' (this always seems to be at a 'make adjustment layer', although there is always exactly the same step a few steps back that it managed, but gets to this one and doesn't know what to do).  These actions have been run over B&W images thousands of times before with no problem so again, I cannot understand WHAT has happened and why this is happening? 

I really hope someone can help me because I am TOTALLY confused and rather desperate.  

(I am on LR 5.3, PS CC, running Florabella actions)


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## Victoria Bampton (Jul 29, 2014)

Hi Michelle, welcome to the forum!  Don't panic, it's easily solved.

I don't know what's changed, but ProPhotoRGB is a good choice for Photoshop, so leave that set in the external editor preferences and Photoshop's color settings.

Then when you want to export photos or email them, select sRGB in the export dialog.  That should output the right colors on non-color-managed software like web browsers.

Your couldn't complete the command error might be due to 16-bit instead of 8-bit, so it could certainly be related.  Can you open one of the files, convert to 8-bit and then try the action and see if that works?


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