‘Preview’ color issue in OS Sequoia 15.7.7

Based on your description, this appears to be a software-related color management issue in Preview introduced after updating to macOS Sequoia 15.7.7, rather than a problem with your display or the PSD files themselves. The fact that Finder thumbnails display correctly, while Quick Look and Preview render the same PSD with muted colors, suggests that Preview is interpreting the embedded ProPhoto RGB profile differently after the update.

Step 1: Verify the issue is limited to Preview

Open the same PSD in another color-managed application, such as Adobe Photoshop or another editor that supports ProPhoto RGB.

• If the colors appear correct there, your PSD file and embedded color profile are intact.
• This confirms the issue is isolated to Preview or Quick Look.

Step 2: Test with another color profile

Create a copy of the PSD and convert it to Adobe RGB (1998) or sRGB (do not assign a new profile—convert the profile).

Then open the converted file in Preview.

• If the converted file displays correctly, it further indicates that Preview's handling of ProPhoto RGB PSD files has changed in macOS 15.7.7.

Step 3: Rebuild the Quick Look cache

Since Quick Look and Preview use related rendering components, rebuilding the cache may help.

1. Open Terminal.
2. Run:

qlmanage -r cache

1. Restart your Mac and test the PSD again.

Step 4: Test with a new user account

Create a temporary macOS user account and open the same PSD in Preview.

• If the issue occurs in the new account as well, it points to a system-wide issue.
• If it only occurs in your original account, the problem may be related to your user profile or preferences.

Step 5: Reset Preview preferences

Close Preview, then remove its preference file:

• Open Finder > Go > Go to Folder
• Enter:

~/Library/Preferences

• Locate the Preview preference file and move it to the Desktop.
• Restart Preview and test again.

If this does not help, you can restore the preference file.

Step 6: Check for embedded profile integrity

In Adobe Photoshop, verify that:

• The PSD still has the correct ProPhoto RGB profile embedded.
• The profile is not marked as missing or invalid.

Since your JPEGs in ProPhoto RGB display correctly, the issue appears to affect PSD rendering specifically, rather than ProPhoto RGB as a whole.

If the issue persists

Given that you have already:

• Started in Safe Mode.
• Reinstalled macOS 15.7.7.
• Adjusted display color profiles.
• Worked with Apple Support.

…the remaining evidence strongly suggests a regression in Preview's PSD color management introduced in macOS 15.7.7.

At this point, the recommended action is to report the behavior through Apple Feedback Assistant with:

• A sample PSD exhibiting the issue.
• Screenshots comparing Finder thumbnails, Quick Look, Preview, and Photoshop.
• The embedded color profile information.

This will provide Apple with the information needed to investigate and, if confirmed, address the issue in a future macOS update.

Note: Since you prefer to remain on Sequoia, there is no supported way to revert only to 15.6.1 without a backup created before the update. If this is a software regression, the resolution will likely come through a future Sequoia update rather than a configuration change.

Apple's Quick Look isn't Preview and may be using a different color profile than that PSD's ProPhoto RGB. Double-click an image to open it in Preview, and press cmd+i to open the Inspector. Is the ColorSync profile item shown for the image still ProPhoto RGB?

Your Mac screen may be configured for sRGB or Display P3 unless you have purposely used a third-party tool to calibrate your screen. Sometimes, Apple changes settings in updates or upgrades, and you may need to revisit the settings you had set in the earlier release of Sequoia.

What I meant to post but the change didn't take…

Apple's Quick Look isn't Preview and may be using a different color space for display than your PSD's ProPhoto RGB. While open in Quick Look, select Open in Preview. In Preview, press cmd+i to open the Inspector and then click the i on the inspector toolbar to reveal the EXIF category where you can confirm the color space again.

There's nothing wrong with Preview. There is something wrong in your color setup. PSD makes no difference. If it were unsupported, it wouldn't open. If a person wants to talk about unsupported, then point to Affinity's .af format. Which at this time, literally no other app on the planet other than their own can open.

All color looks the same on my Mac no matter what file format it is, or what app I open them in. It's all about proper color management. I opened a .jpg image sitting on my desktop in Photoshop and saved it out as a .tif and .psd image. Then did a Convert to Profile to sRGB and saved it again as a .jpg, .tif and .psd. As no surprise whatsoever to me, they all display exactly the same in any app I can open them in. All 6 images are literally identical in Preview. Two examples here of them. One in each color space.

The basic mistake the majority of users make is trusting any supplied profile as something you can use with your monitor. You can't. There's only one profile on your computer by default that is even slightly useful. And that's the profile pulled from the display panel. You'll find it in the /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays folder. Look for that one in the Displays section of the System Settings.

Any others are not monitor profiles at all. Profiles are a capture of the calibration and color range/gamut of only the device being measured. sRGB, ColorMatchRGB, Adobe RGB, WideGamut, etc. are all just general hunks of Lab. None of these in any way represent the color response of your monitor. Or your printer, scanner, digital camera or projection device. As one example, a profile for glossy paper on an Epson printer is completely useless for glossy paper on a Canon printer. It isn't even useful on another Epson printer of a different model.

Of all to the profiles you can have, the monitor is the most important one. All other color is based on an accurately measured monitor profile. Unless the knows exactly what the tonal response of your monitor is, then badly guessing is all the OS (ColorSync) can do to try and match it to anything else.

jsgadz1 wrote: I’m incredibly frustrated with Apple, as this only happened going from Sequoia 15.6.1 to 15.7.7.

That's just when you noticed it. Here's one particularly good example from 2024: macOS Sequoia Bug - Preview misinterprets… - Apple Community

There's nothing wrong with the PSD format per se. It's just old. When dealing with modern Apple, one must ask a basic question - how would I do this on an iPhone? If the answer is something like "that doesn't make sense" or "I couldn't", then you're in dangerous territory. There are no more Macintosh computers - haven't been for a few years now. They're all just iPhones now.

So when I say "it's not supported". That doesn't mean you can't open the format at all. What I mean is that nobody at Apple has opened a PSD file in years, and on an iPhone ever? There's like 30 years of detail there that could have been lost in the 4 complete software rewrites that Apple's gone through when they first rolled out support for Adobe's format.

This is an inherently tricky problem. An image file just has numbers in it. There has to be some kind of mechanism to translate those numbers into colours. Then there's another mechanism to render those colours on the screen (or printer) so that they are as close as possible to the original scene's colours. And then there's the image format. Different formats have different capabilities with respect to colour.

So if you have the same image that displays two different ways, something's gone wrong. Maybe the image was actually encoded with sRGB but labelled with something else. Or perhaps the image is encoded and tagged correctly but the OS isn't displaying it correctly. I've done a little bit of work with this on an app I have in development. I haven't done enough work to really understand it, but I can see how it can get confusing. There are many, many different low-level APIs for handing this data. Each one has a different set of assumptions and defaults. In order to get decent performance on a handheld device, Apple and other vendors are adopting more low-level techniques where colourspace accuracy simply isn't a priority. This logic was designed for gaming and exclusively for gaming. A developer literally has to learn a new version of the (English) language just to understand the terminology.

I honestly don't know if your image (or the one I referenced) is wrong or the OS is wrong. I can definitely confirm that I can see the difference in some contexts and not others. That firmly establishes the fact that somebody, somewhere, did something wrong. Otherwise, the images would be either different everywhere or the same everywhere.

I like the example from 2024 just because I can download the images and see it for myself. That's much more difficult when there are just screenshots of images. Screenshots of images are still valuable, but in a different way.

So when I open those two images from 2024, they appear identical any way I look at them on an 2017 Intel MBP running Ventura. But as I try them on newer computers with newer OS versions, it gets worse on each one. So was it fundamentally broken across the board, by Apple and 3rd party developers in 2022? And they are just starting to figure it all out in 2026 and display the images differently now? That doesn't make sense.

PS: I also checked my 2014 computer running Big Sur. Same consistency as Ventura.

Are you saying that .icc file found in /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays is what Im supposed to upload into the Displays section of System Settings?

With nothing better to choose from, yes. But then you're stuck with whatever settings the person who made that one-off profile set it to. Which is usually the worst possible choice of a 6500K gray balance. There's nothing gray about a color balance as obviously blue as 6500K.

Finding out what that profile name is in your lists is another matter. If you double click the profile in that folder, ColorSync will open. When you select the second item in the list, it will show you the name you will see in your lists. The name on the desktop usually means nothing. Such as this for the default profile pulled by the OS from my EIZO CG279x. In this case, the name to look for would be Display.

What you see can depend in what's in the next field. Back to this same profile, Display does not appear in any lists, but instead the second field's name of CG279X (I didn't choose en for English, but they're all CG279X).

That one does appear. And because it's in the default Displays folder, it appears above the line.

I should have seen or thought of this sooner, but I know what's happening. And it's a mess.

From the post before this one I'm replying to (where you start out your response with, Hi! Thanks for your reply and insight.)

but color profile is just set as ‘iMac’ in ‘Displays’.

Which means you're already using the default monitor profile tucked into the /Library/ColorSync/Profiles/Displays folder. Better than nothing, or any other canned profile on the system, though still much room for improvement.

Somehow, some way, you are losing an assigned profile, choosing to change it incorrectly, or a couple of other possibilities. I grabbed your two smaller examples from your response to VikingOSX, but one of them doesn't have the profile it says in the screen shot. The one where Preview's info says ProPhoto RGB, was actually saved with sRGB.

But anyway, short version. It appears you assigned ProPhoto RGB in Photoshop rather than converting. There is a huge difference in how these two options work.

As is with sRGB:

Assign Profile using ProPhoto RGB rather than converting:

Exactly what I would expect to happen. Everything gets more saturated. If I go back to the sRGB version and use Convert to Profile, the color doesn't change at all (next image). Also exactly what's supposed to happen:

On top of that, most of images you've uploaded here are tagged as sRGB. Two of them, iMac. When you do a screen shot, the monitor profile is always the one that's assigned to the saved image. So if all of these started out as screen shots, how did six of them end up as sRGB?

It doesn't help in the least that Apple uses this language in Preview:

It is absolutely not assigning a profile when you choose this option. It's converting. If it were assigning, the color on every image you use that option with would change. They don't.

Brief (as possible) explanation between Assign and Convert.

1. Lab is the fixed color model all profiles fit to. Profiles are hunks of Lab with fixed gamut points and color ranges. Such as, 255,0,0 red in sRGB does not have the same Lab values as in (pick one) Wide Gamut RGB. It can't, since 255,0,0 isn't in the same position for each profile within Lab.
2. Convert: As much as possible, the Lab values of the pixels stays right where they are and the RGB values change to where the original Lab values line up. Color of the image does not change.
3. Assign: Just the opposite. As much as possible, the RGB values of the pixels do not change, but instead move to where that RGB value is in the target profile. Lab values change to where that same RGB value falls within the new profile. Color of the image changes.

jsgadz1 wrote:

Now I'm wondering if this is an Apple issue or an Adobe issue...

This is definitely an Apple issue. The files display properly in Adobe don't they?

There are multiple issues. First is the PSD format. That's not a native Apple format. Apple may not really support it anymore. If you want to compare, I would use TIFF images.

Secondly, color accuracy has never been a big issue with iOS devices. They are mobile devices with limited hardware capabilities. There are lots of internal shortcuts. People who have been working with these kinds of images for years often encounter these kinds of problems on recent Macs. They're confused because Macs, sometimes, even the same Mac, handled the same images fine in previous years. But there are no more Macs. They are just iOS devices, with lots of different screen sizes. All those old shortcuts are still there. It's all designed to display on a 6" screen with limited RAM.

There are two ways to approach this problem. You can stick to traditional tools like Adobe, and stick to them. That means not using Preview. Or you can adopt modern Apple tools designed for iOS (and I mean iOS). That means using HEIC images with default settings. Maybe you can play around with the "ProRAW" stuff. But you can't mix and match.

Slight correction.

It is absolutely not assigning a profile when you choose this option. It's converting. If it were assigning, the color on every image you use that option with would change. They don't.

Assign Profile would only be correct if you opened an image in Preview that has no profile attached to it. Same as the message Photoshop shows you. Then you have to give it something in order to manage color. The hard part is correctly guessing what profile the person who created the image was using as their working color. sRGB? Adobe RGB? P3? It's a crap shoot.

Which now leads another, even bigger correction. The OS is NOT assigning profiles properly to screen shots. I ran across this issue in another topic some time ago and had forgotten about it. This image right here correctly says my monitor profile is attached to the screen shot - when I open it in Preview. But Photoshop insists it has no profile. If I save the image out of Preview unaltered (I used PNG) and open that in PS, then it sees the embedded profile.

So, who's screwing up? Apple or Adobe? Per etresoft's notes, I would have to say Preview is the problem. Which is part of the reason I never suggest anyone use it for image work. It's a junk app, and always has been.

I've used every version of the Mac OS since OS 8.x. Also every single point version of macOS. I also did professional image color and retouching for 45+ years. Never, ever, did any update cause the color to display differently between Quick Look, or any other app or viewing option.

The OS has nothing to do with this. Bad color management is the cause.

aayushmaurya wrote:

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I would have to say Preview is the problem.

And thinking about it more, that doesn't hold water. Preview fixed the problem when I saved a new file. Rather, it appears the OS itself is not tagging screen shots correctly when it creates them.

Which may help explain why thumbnails and screen shots display differently in Quick Look or whatever. Though going through the same steps as much as I could to understand what jsgadz1 was doing/seeing, I could not get color to do anything but display just as I expected it to.