Today’s Question: When a JPEG image having sRGB (or other) embedded profile is opened into Camera Raw, it appears that the image’s profile is automatically converted to Camera Raw’s working space. Is this true, and is there a workaround?
Tim’s Quick Answer: If you process a JPEG image with Camera Raw, the resulting image will indeed have the color space and bit depth modified based on the current settings in Camera Raw. You need to change the Workflow settings in the Camera Raw Preferences dialog to avoid these changes.
More Detail: If you have a JPEG image in the sRGB (or similar) color space profile, I don’t generally recommend converting the profile for the image. I also don’t recommend converting a JPEG image from 8-bit per channel to 16-bit per channel, which Camera Raw will also do by default. If you were to convert to 16-bit per channel, you would need to save the image in a different format, as JPEG only supports 8-bit per channel.
The settings for how or whether these changes are made in Camera Raw are controlled by the Workflow settings in the Camera Raw Preferences dialog. While in Camera Raw, for example, you can click the text summary below the preview image that indicates the current settings for the conversion. That will bring up the Camera Raw Preferences dialog with the Workflow tab selected. In the Color Space section, you can choose the desired color space profile (such as sRGB) and the bit depth (such as 8 Bits/Component).
It is important to keep in mind that the new settings will become the default settings for images that have not previously been processed with Camera Raw. Therefore, if you were to later process a raw capture you would want to be sure to change the bit depth to 16 Bits/Component and the color space to ProPhoto RGB (or your preferred working space profile).
The key thing to keep in mind is that if you choose to make use of the ability to process JPEG, HEIC, and TIFF images with Camera Raw, the output settings for Camera Raw will apply equally to those images, just as when processing raw captures.
