AdobeRGB* VS Adobe RGB

Question

When I open an image in PSE3 it shows RGB/8* and another image opens and shows RGB/8 with no asterick.
The first image is shot in sRGB and the second is shot in AdobeRGB.
Is this why the asterick appears?
Thanks
Richard Cooper

Answer 1

Richard,
Colin is correct, "RGB/8*" does indicates your document colour profile does
not match your work space profile. PSE4 works as Colin said. However, you
said you have PSE3. PSE3 works a little differently -- you can only get
"RGB/8*" when you have your color settings set to "Full Color Management".
If you have your color settings anything else, you won't see that.
You asked "So, PSE3 workspace is set to RGB and any image that is not RGB
would be astericked.
Correct?"
No, not quite. First of all, let's go over what "RGB/8" means. The "8" part
is easy. This is just the bit depth of the color channels. In this case 8
bits per channel. The "RGB" part is the color mode of the image. If the
mode were Grayscale this would read "Gray", Indexed mode would read
"Indexed" and so forth. Since yours says "RGB", the image is in RGB mode.
PSE3 only supports a few color modes. RGB is one and Grayscale, Bitmap, and
Indexed are the others. If you try to open an image in an unsupported mode
such as CMYK or LAB, you'll get a popup message saying the mode is
unsupported and there will be a button to allow you to convert to RGB mode.
The "*" on the end has to do with the color profile associated with the
image. Profile and Mode are not the same thing. The mode describes how
colors are represented (RGB says that each color will be represented by a
Red value, a Green value, and a Blue value). By themselves, these are just
numbers in the range of 0 to 255. Determining what those numbers mean is
the role of the profile which decribes how these color values are to be
interpreted. There can be many profiles for the same mode. Adobe RGB and
sRGB are both RGB profiles and are probably the most common. There are
other RGB profiles as well.
When you set your color settings to "Full Color Management", you told PSE3
that you wanted it to use Adobe RGB for the default internal working color
space. However, this setting will also attempt to retain any color space
profile which may be embedded in the image. The "*" tells you that PSE3 did
just that. Your default color space is Adobe RBG but your working color
space is something else -- most likely sRGB, but other RGB profiles could
have been embedded instead. When you see the "*" in PSE3, your work space
profile is not Adobe RGB, you are using the embedded profile.
PSE4 is improved over PSE3 in how it handles color management and profiles
and can do limited conversions between sRGB and Adobe RGB. You might want
to consider upgrading to it if you need to convert Adobe RGB to sRGB often.
Bob