Saturday, January 18, 2014

Serious color management bug in Mac OS 10.9 "Mavericks"

Update Feb 26, 2014 - Just updated a machine to 10.9.2, the update that fixes the nasty SSL bug. It does NOT fix this color management bug.

After quite a bit of testing I have come to the conclusion that there is a serious color management bug in Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. This is subtle but will result in your shadows being displayed much darker than they really are. The bug affects almost every color managed program and is present whether you use a display profiler such as a Spyder or whether you use the built in profiles. The bug was introduced with 10.9 and is not present in 10.8. So if you are a pro using Mac OS X, stay on 10.8 for now. Strangely enough, Photoshop displays correctly, but it is the only program that does consistently. Aperture plugs the shadows. Lightroom displays correctly in the Library module but incorrectly in the Develop module which makes developing your pictures when looking for shadow detail difficult. I already submitted a bug report to Apple so we'll see if it gets fixed. I am not the first to notice this as is clear from this thread on Adobe's Lightroom forum.

This is the display in Photoshop(correct) on 10.9.1

This is Aperture on Mac OS X 10.9.1:

The first row has disappeared and the second row is much darker than it should be

This is Lightroom Library module (close to correct)

And this is Lightroom Develop (way off again):

Hope this is useful to somebody. The test file came from lagom, which I turned into a RGB tiff file with an included sRGB profile so that Aperture could read it. Again, on 10.8 the display is identical in all software. Also, it doesn't matter whether you calibrate or not or what calibrator you use, they all show the issue. I used a Spyder 3 Pro here but the issue shows up with other calibrators too.

EDIT: This bug is fixed in Aperture. It is still present in Lightroom and Safari

12 comments:

  1. Even though I'm a Windows platform user its interesting reading :-)

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  2. I'm currently running Lightroom 4 and Sypder3Express on Mountain Lion. I've been thinking about the pros and cons of an upgrade to Mavericks/Yosemite. Apparently Lightroom 4 sliders don't display properly in Mavericks, and the only solution is a paid upgrade to Lightroom 5. I wasn't aware of the issue described here until today.

    One question. Have you found any compatibility issues with the Spyder3 on Mavericks? The Datacolor website states that the Spyder4 range is compatible, but makes no reference to Spyder3.

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    1. As far as I know the Spyder 3 works fine. The bug with color management in Mavericks is not specific to the calibration solution you use. It does it wrong no matter which calibrator you generated the profile with.

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  3. For those stumbling upon this blog post, the color management bug is still present in Mavericks 10.9.3. You can force the display of shadows to be correct in Lightroom by turning on Soft proofing and setting the proof profile to something like adobeRGB or sRGB depending on the characteristics of your display. My guess is that Lightroom then uses its own color management routines instead of the system one. This does slow Develop down a bit though.

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  4. Still there in 10.9.4? Just got my first mac for Lightroom and PS use exclusively. This is a downer!

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    1. Yes. Still there. It is also in the Yosemite beta I found out. It does not affect PS, but it does affect Lightroom.

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  5. Apple needs to step up their quality control. ICC profile problems are unacceptable for designers and photographers. Every release is a buggy beta these days, Mavericks included. I use Colormunki Photo. Worked. Ridiculously good profiles. Since 10.9.3 starting up Photoshop (or a simple other app like mPlayer) causes Mavericks to color shift as if it switches to a different profile. Result? Unable to postproces images accurately for fashion magazines and art exhibitions. It's a living nightmare and it's a bug that needs to be fixed. Soon. Unfortunately it is taking them months already and even still in the next OS beta, crap! This DOES affect PS for me (even reinstalled, new usered, new profiled) as it does lightroom but also simple apps like VLC, mPlayer and more. It's an underlying system bug. I can't believe Apple left us pro photographers in the cold. I might have to sell my brand new Retina maxed out machine and switch to Windows to be able to just work. Lord!

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  6. I realise this is an old thread but has anybody managed to sort the problem. Just upgraded to Mavericks and i have the same issue with Lightroom 5.7

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    1. This bug was fixed in later versions of OS X and Lightroom after Mavericks. There still is a problem with Safari and sRGB images not rendering deep shadows correctly.

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  7. Thanks for the reply. Actually I made a mistake. It happened to me when I upgraded to the new El Capitan not Mavericks. But it's the same problem as described in the post. Any ideas how to fix that? Can't seem to find much about it

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    1. The fix was made in Lightroom. Adobe found the issue and I don't see it anymore. I don't remember which update fixed it. There still is an issue left with Eizo monitors that have black point compensation turned on in the profile.

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    2. Barbara, I've also written many updates on this on another blog post: http://lagemaat.blogspot.com/2014/08/further-quantification-of-mavericks.html I'll recheck my Lightroom machine tonight, which runs El Cap and LR 2015.4 and should also still have a 5.7 installation on it.

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