The Important Photoshop Tab Clues You’re Probably Ignoring

Tiny marks in your Adobe Photoshop document tab can quietly signal problems that cost time, color accuracy, or even a full edit. If you have ever seen an asterisk or a hash and ignored it, there is a good chance you have chased the same confusion later when a file suddenly looks off.

Coming to you from Glyn Dewis, this practical video breaks down what those symbols mean and how to react without stopping your workflow. Dewis starts with the easiest one to spot: an asterisk after the filename in the tab. It shows up fast, sometimes after changes that feel harmless, like toggling a layer’s visibility. The point is blunt: what’s on screen no longer matches what’s saved to disk. If you have ever closed the wrong file, had a crash, or trusted recovery a little too much, that small symbol is the warning you wanted earlier.

The more interesting part comes when the asterisk is not after the filename, but tucked inside the brackets near the file’s details. Here, the message is not about saving at all. It is about color management, and the difference between the document’s embedded profile and Photoshop’s working space. You will hear examples like sRGB and Adobe RGB (1998), and how opening mixed files can be normal until you start building composites, pasting elements, or exporting for someone else. Dewis also addresses a complaint that keeps coming up: why the same photo can look one way in Adobe Lightroom and a different way once it lands in Photoshop. That gap often has nothing to do with your display being “wrong” and everything to do with what color space each app assumes at that moment.

Then there is the hash symbol inside the brackets, and this is where people get tripped up without realizing it. A hash means the file is untagged RGB, so Photoshop has no embedded profile to tell it how to interpret the numbers. That can happen with screenshots, web images, and older files that have had metadata stripped. Photoshop will still show the image, but it is making an assumption based on your settings, and that assumption may not match the file’s origin. If you do print work, brand matching, or anything where consistency matters across systems, this is the symbol that should slow you down. Dewis walks through a clean way to correct it, and the path he uses inside Photoshop is simple enough to remember, but the nuance of choosing the right destination profile is what makes the segment worth watching.

One useful thread running through the video is that these symbols are not “errors” so much as status indicators, and they only help if you react with intent instead of habit. You will see a Lightroom-to-Photoshop handoff example where a raw file becomes a TIFF and arrives with a wide-gamut profile, which is exactly the kind of moment that triggers questions about “why it changed.” You also get a peek into how working spaces are set, and how changing them can make a symbol disappear, even though the underlying decision still deserves thought. If you combine files from clients, stock sites, screenshots, and different cameras, the tab becomes a quick diagnostic panel. The video gives you enough to stop guessing, but it also leaves room for you to decide when to leave things alone and when to force consistency. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Dewis.