Preview Color Management Issue - pasted image assigned Adobe RGB
I often layout web elements in InDesign as my composition tool, then copy/paste into Photoshop as a smart object to then generate web optimised images. It's just easier than using photoshop. Trouble is, in recent versions Adobe have stuffed up the anti-aliasing engine and now when rasterising a PDF or pasting an image from elsewhere as a smart object any image portion of that asset is no longer anti-aliased. You really don't notice if the original image placed in InDesign is say double or more that resolution of the end product web version, the scaling hides the issue. But if they are closer in actual size really visible faceting occurs. Long story… anyway I decided to investigate Apple's Preview application as a gateway for the rasterising instead of photoshop. It does do a good job on resampling the pasted asset, but on saving this out and checking in Photoshop I note that Preview has assigned the processed image the Adobe RGB profile. The same if I open the InDesign PDF and export as an image to my required size. My colour workflow is sRGB. InDesign and Photoshop are both setup this way, the image placed in InDesign also has sRGB profile, the PDF has sRGB profile. If I copy and paste between InDesign and Photoshop they are both aware of the colour space of the pasted asset and will warn me if different than the target document. I have no idea where Preview is getting Adobe RGB from, I can see no place in the app to change this as a preference, and at any rate it seems very strange to be a default when most people would not use it.