Raw, Color Profile, Apple Photo, saturation and inconsistencies

Another discovery: I preview my notorius CR3 picture with the finder inspector and guess what? Initially it's rendered correctly. But if I resize a bit the finder window the picture magically becomes oversaturated... This is just as crazy as it gets...

Hi ryane77, thanks for your suggestion. From my understanding it doesn't look to be a profile issue at all (there is no device strictly speaking to which I can associate a profile). It looks like being an issue with the way CR3 Canon RAW type of files are shown. As a demonstration to that, CR2 Canon RAW files are displayed correctly as are jpeg previews extracted from a CR3 file using a tool such as e.g. exiftool. Furthermore, CR3 pictures on Affinity Photo, DxO PhotoLab 3 or even darktable look fine on my system. It seems to be just Apple Preview and Apple Photo that both shows CR3 files (and only them) oversaturated... I'll post a comment to Apple Support as well. Thanks.

Hi OldToad, unfortunately I can switch the screen profile to any of P3, Rec709 or sRGB and the oversaturation is still there. This issue (I reinstate) happens only with CR3 RAW format... I also double-checked what happens on both my Mac Studio with the Eizo monitor and on my MacBook Pro 14" 2021. No difference. I went ahead and sent the CR3 file to 2 iPhones: an old SE 1. generations with iOS 15.7.3 and a 12 mini with iOS 16.4. Curiously (fasten seat belts, please) both phones show the picture correctly in iMessages BUT if I save the picture in Photo, the SE will still show it correctly, whereas the 12 mini THAN over saturates it...

At this stage it would be interesting to find out if anyone out there can correctly preview a EOS90D CR3 Canon RAW picture on latest macOS and iOS, because the problem seems rooted there, rather then in color profile settings.

Cheers,

Yep, both are. I'll probably give a try, although I'm afraid to enter a maze with no exit. I'm also pondering to just log in a bug report. At this stage, to me it clearly looks as one, probably introduced with recent OS releases.

Thanks.

Thank you very much for the test file, very kind of you! I printed it and matches perfectly to what the Eizo shows. I'm not at all surprised, as I keep the whole chain calibrated with a Calibrite Colorchecker. Frankly up to recently I'd never had any issue with jpg, pgn, even Canon CR2 raw files shot on a Canon 70D, Blackmagic BRAW video files or even Canon H264 compressed .mov files in any application. Everything is just perfectly as expected. The full color managed chain works like a charm with the exception being the CR3 files from the Canon 90D. jpgs from the 90D are perfect. And the raw version is OK in all other apps that I use (Affinity, DxO etc.). I mean, I can perfectly live with such a bug, having found the workaround in RawPower I mentioned in my first post, and I can still develop CR3 RAW with my other apps which show no problem at all. I brought up the issue because I find practical to use Photos.app as a repository of my stuff and it is there where I first discovered the inconsistency.

Thanks again!

Just to extend the tests I went ahead and downloaded from dpreview some test pictures shot with other Canon cameras which generate CR3 RAW, such as e.g. Canon R5 and Canon R6. I than tested Apple Photo.app against Canon's own utility "Digital Photo Professional 4". Here are my findings: all of the above discussion is applicable to RAW pictures shot with all three cameras, i.e. all three are off, particularly in the greens, although to different degrees. The 90D being the worse, the R5 falling in between and the R6 being the most faithful out of the three, but still slightly off. At this point matter settled (at least for me).