Contents
- 1 Background
- 2 The Problem
- 3 Concepts and Misconceptions
- 4 Color Managed Applications and Workflow
- 5 Display Calibration and Profiling
- 6 Photoshop Color Management Setup
- 7 Color Manage 3D Renders in Photoshop
- 7.1 The Nonlinear Workflow
- 7.2 Conversion Intents
- 7.3 Photoshop Saving
- 8 The Linear Workflow
- 9 Soft Proofing the Render Display
- 10 Compositing and Film Editing
- 10.1 After Effects
- 10.2 Film Editing
- 11 More Color Managed Applications
- 11.1 Image Viewing
- 11.2 Web Browsing
- 12 Conclusion
Everything you always wanted to know about color management but were afraid to ask.
Despite the title this article applies just as well for non wide gamut displays, and even though I am writing this article from a CG Artist’s perspective, most of the information is relevant to photo and film workflows as well.
I’ve recently done some extensive research about color management, ICC profiling, “mysterious” color changes when leaving Photoshop and how it applies to a 3D workflow (as well as photo or film workflows). There’s a ton of information and advice out there when googling the subject. Much is contradictory and more or less causes confusion instead of enlightenment when trying to understand what is going on.
After a few days of extensive research, filtering all kinds of information from articles, books and forum threads as well as my own tests and explorations I have got a pretty good understanding of how it all ties together.
Armed to my teeth with this knowledge, I thought I’d share my findings and workflows by writing an article on the subject.
In this article I’ll talk about how to calibrate and profile your display and then how to configure and setup your 2D, 3D and post processing applications for a color managed workflow.
Background
Well, I actually believed I had somewhat basic understanding of how color management worked, but about a month ago I realized that I did indeed have a problem. It started with my Dell 2407 WFP display dying on me after a few years of heavy usage and Dell sent me a new replacement screen. I got a newer model, the Dell 2408 WFP with a wide gamut display.
Hardware and Software
This is the hardware I am currently using and the software I’ll be referencing in the article.
- Hardware: Dell 2408 WFP wide gamut display, Datacolor Spyder 3 Elite display calibration.
- Software: Photoshop CS4, After Effects CS4, LightWave 3D, modo, Firefox, XnView.
- OS: Windows Vista (The wide gamut “problem” exists on Mac OS as well, and much of what I write will apply there).
LightWave 3D is as far as I know the only 3D application on the market that allows true color management (through a free plugin). I was a bit surprised that modo 401 didn’t provide full color management in it’s new release as wide gamut screens are getting quite common – especially in the market modo is targeting at the moment, where seeing correct colors while rendering is important.
Full color management is also in the works for Blender, I don’t know if we’ll see it in the coming version 2.5, but if we do, I’ll definitely take a look at it.
I believe it’s pretty hard to find a large screen today which isn’t a wide gamut display, and I guess that it will soon be more or less impossible, so I really hope more CG applications will be fully color managed in the future.
The Problem
After having received my Dell 2408WFP display I started seeing some really strange color shifts going on. When I had worked on an image in Photoshop and saved it out and opened it in another application all colors appeared extremely oversaturated. And when I say extremely I really mean it. Reds where out of this world. The same was true when just browsing the images on my own site in Firefox. Characters that I was earlier pleased with looked like they where suffering from a bad hangover with oversaturated skin tones and so on.
The same was also true the other way around, when I had worked with a 3D render and was happy with it, saved it out and opened it in Photoshop for post processing nothing looked like the render I had saved out. Colors became very dull and dark.
I started scratching my head to understand what was going on, I had seen small shifts in colors many times before when going in and out of Photoshop, but nothing even close to this. I tried recalibrating my screen several times with my Spyder 3 Elite but to no avail, and reached a point where I was almost afraid to deliver new images because I was so confused and didn’t know anymore what was right or wrong.
Color Difference
Were the colors correct in my render display when working in LightWave 3D or modo for instance and Photoshop was the bad dude that screwed them up? My screen was correctly calibrated to my understanding at the time. Or was Photoshop correct and everything else wrong? How did other people see my images? Did they see them like how I saw them in Photoshop or like they looked in my 3D application?
Lot’s of questions and no real answers to be found in an easy way. Little did I know that the wide gamut (words I hadn’t really paid attention to) was the cause of me seeing the problems so clearly for the first time when jumping between color aware and non color aware applications.
Anyway, I faced a situation that made it impossible for me to work as usual, so I started digging, I needed to know and foremost understand what was going on. As long as one understand what’s going on and why it happens, it’s not really a problem anymore.
So there did my quest to battle the oversaturated versus dull colors start.
Concepts and Misconceptions
Okay, let’s start with clearing up a few concepts so we get a better understanding of what’s really happening. I want this to be a very clear article that do answer the questions many people with these kind of problems are facing instead of generating more confusion. So let’s give it a shot.
- Wide Gamut
Starting with the oversaturated colors on wide gamut displays. In the past displays were showing colors that were pretty close and limited to what we know as the sRGB color space, with newer displays we have a much larger color range to work with – closer to the Adobe RGB color space. When an application wants to display a pure red pixel (RGB 255,0,0) it sends a signal to the screen that the brightest red should be displayed.
A non color aware application (we’ll go deeper into this further in the article) just dumbly assumes that the display is within the sRGB range and blindly sends the raw pixel data where in the case of a wide gamut screen, which can display much brighter colors, receives the signal of displaying the brightest red, do just that, displays the brightest red that it’s capable of, which then leads to the extremely oversaturated image. - Calibration
When calibrating a LCD display with a hardware device like the Spyder 3 from Datacolor, most people understandably assumes that the display will be calibrated to correctly display colors in the sRGB space.
That is an incorrect assumption.
A more correct label is that the display device get profiled, that means that the display’s color performance and characteristics get measured and saved in an ICC profile that color aware applications will use to display colors correctly within selected color spaces. Some calibration do also occur but non in the same sense as in the CRT era where displays where within the sRGB range. LCD displays doesn’t get truly calibrated at all towards a specific color space, they get their Gamma and White Point values calibrated. This is an important concept to understand and as soon as I got it, it all started to make sense to me.
Profiling is the keyword here. - Non Color Managed Applications
Even though the display now has been calibrated and profiled, non color managed applications will still display colors incorrectly, this is especially true on wide gamut displays. And there is simply nothing that can be done about that except using color managed applications. Wide gamut displays are great and the future, but software developers need to catch up with the new hardware and stop assuming all displays are within the sRGB range. I guess this will happen in the coming years and more and more applications will start using and respect color profiles. - Color Matching
Every display is unique, so one can never achieve that colors will look the same for everybody. But having a color managed workflow and a system properly configured will allow you to create images that will look the best on other profiled systems and for the “big masses” with ordinary displays you will have an image that is the best compromise. - Trust Photoshop
When the display has been calibrated and profiled color managed applications like Photoshop will use that profile and modify its display correctly according to the selected color space. So the colors that you are seeing within Photoshop are the “correct” ones that most people will see something close to. - The Monitor RGB Trick
Never ever use the “trick” Proof Setup » Monitor RGB in Photoshop to get the same colors inside and outside of Photoshop. That will only ensure that you are truly messing up colors that probably will look wrong on most other people’s displays, especially those with newer ones. That’s a real bad advice that has been circulating on blogs and forums and should not be adopted. Then you are totally missing out on the power full color management provides. - Gamma Correction is not full Color Management
Some 3D applications has recently claimed to have complete color management, like Autodesk Softimage. While the application have received some very impressive tools for a complete gamma corrected linear workflow, it’s still not fully color managed. Gamma correction is part of the color management, but only deals with luminance. A complete color management system must also handle color spaces and soft proofing.
Most 3D applications have gamma correction of some sort, but the only ones with true color management in color spaces with soft proofing is LightWave 3D with the SG_CCFilter plugin and maybe the coming Blender 2.5.
To sum this section up; the new wide gamut monitors can render much more saturated colors (which is good, when working with color spaces such as Adobe RGB). Images that are displayed without color management on such a monitor will appear very oversaturated.
The only way to get correct colors everywhere is to have color management throughout the system. Every application dealing with images must respect the image’s ICC profile as well as your display’s ICC profile. And every image must be tagged with the proper ICC profile.
Many images today isn’t tagged with an ICC profile, especially on the web, and an untagged image is always shown incorrectly even in a color managed application unless it’s displayed on a monitor within the same color space as the image was designed for. It works out like this:
- Untagged sRGB image » Regular sRGB gamut monitor » Correct colors
- Untagged sRGB image » Wide gamut monitor » Oversaturated colors
- Untagged Adobe RGB image » Regular sRGB gamut monitor » Undersaturated colors
- Untagged Adobe RGB image » Wide gamut monitor » Close to correct colors
With more and more monitors on the market with different gamuts it has become very important to always correctly tag images with the appropriate ICC profile, and to use color managed applications to ensure the best possible color matching. Which is the only existing cure to get consistent colors on different displays.
Color Managed Applications and Workflow
Now when we are armed with the understanding of color management and the importance of profiling the display and correctly tagging images with ICC profiles, you also need software that are color aware to make use of all these goodies.
I’ll walk through calibrating and profiling your monitor and some of the applications I use, there are many other color aware applications out there, but I will keep it at my personal workflow.
I am currently using Windows Vista as my OS, and Vista isn’t color managed in itself, which means that the desktop image, icons, previews etc are displayed oversaturated on my wide gamut monitor, and there is no way around that. I don’t know if Windows 7 will be more color aware, but I guess that could be pretty tough to tag everything displayed in an OS with profiles, perhaps in the successor to Windows 7.
Which leads us to the next section…
VlixJuly 23, 2009
Great article! helped me alot! Big Thanks!
Still some questions…
Are there any color managed Media Player out there? I didn’t find any and as I know QuickTime and MS Media Player are not color managed!!!
Also Adobe Premiere is not yet color managed!
Do you know anything about color management improvments in Windows 7?
( )I would realy like to know if Windows 7 could display color aware applications correctly. I think it should not be that hard to implement it because every untagged / color awre application could be tagged as sRGB and then should be displayed correctly. As I know Windows 7 has improvement in the rendering by supporting 16 – 48 bit per channel but I could not find informations about wide gamut support and correct displaying of color aware applications?
Any information about that would be very helpful.
JohanJuly 27, 2009
Hey there,
I am happy you found it useful.
As far as I know, no Media Player is yet color managed. I’ve seen some tricks to get Media Player Classic to be kind of color aware, but it seemed like to much hassle for me to endeavor. I’ll sit tight and I’m sure it will arrive a color managed player sooner or later. The biggest dilemma is that no video formats embed ICC profiles – but I guess the player could assume HDTV (rec 709) or SDTV profiles based on the video format and then use the display profile to give correct colors. I hope some solution like that will surface anyway.
About Adobe Premiere, it has bothered me as well, that not even the slightest basic color management implementation is available. I find it kind of strange considering that Adobe has done a fine job in most of their other applications. I guess they might think one uses an accurate second external production monitor when color is important. But personally I haven’t used that in years and would find it natural that they color manage the viewer based on the sequence’s selected format.
At the moment I do all my color gradings together with all other processing of my scenes in After Effects and bring them to the final visual state and just use Premiere for editing together the scenes afterward – and adding audio. I don’t touch the color controls in Premiere, until Adobe implement at least basic color management.
I remember seeing that the latest version of Sony Vegas Pro, v9, had implemented color management, at least in the sense that you could assign your monitor profile for the preview window, so we’re definitely heading in the right direction for editors as well. Perhaps we will get there in Adobe Premiere CS5 as well?
About color management in Windows 7, it’s getting better but still no cigar. Non color managed applications will still be over saturated in Windows 7. See my comment below for some more information I found regarding the color development in Windows 7 and coming versions.
Cheers!
( )ReenuKamalSeptember 16, 2009
Nice work throughout……… your work is really inspirational…specially the late night Zbrush doodle….
i really liked the detail of the neck area
Reenu Kamal
( )Owner – http://www.cgtextures.com
SpakainasJuly 24, 2009
Very informative article. Hope it helps. I’m experiencing same oversaturation and image mismatch problems with my HP LP2475 W monitor.
As for Windows 7 colour management, it’s not managed. I’m using W7 x64 version and its icons look terrible. So far I managed to get right colours in FireFox. Hopefully, I’ll be able to set things right with my photos.
Once again, thanks for some tips.
( )JohanJuly 26, 2009
Hi,
Thanks for your comment.
About Windows 7 and Wide Gamut Displays. I found some interesting information on the subject in Microsoft’s Answers forum.
In Windows 7 they have implemented something called High Color Technology, which is supposed to deal with Wide Gamut displays and make sure colors does look as they should on them.
The Desktop Window Manager didn’t get High Color technology implemented in time for the release of Windows 7, but they aim to get it added to the Windows Desktop for the version coming after Windows 7 as far as I understand from Microsoft’s reply.
You can find the answer in question from the Program Manager at Windows Experience Color & Imaging Team as the last entry in this thread:
How do I get sRGB images to display correct in unmanaged applications on Vista with a Wide Gamut Display?
And in case that link should cease to exist, here is a quote of the reply in the above thread about color management of the desktop in Windows 7:
Hi J_______,
I wish I could give you good news, but the fact of the matter is that the Windows desktop, and most windows components are still not color managed. The Window Photo Gallery, and Windows Live Photo Gallery are the only Windows components that color manage to the display profile. Most Office apps will honor embedded source profiles in images, but then they convert to sRGB and throw that at the display. And IE doesn’t even honor embedded profiles in images…
As you have determined, the settings in the Color Management control panel only affect color managed applications. The settings on the CM Cpl Advanced tab are used to supply defaults for missing profiles required during WCS color transform creation in color managed apps. Again no help for you there.
As far as color managing non-color-managed applications “behind their backs” goes, that is very difficult to do in general. There is no easy way for the OS to tell whether the color data an application is rendering has already been color managed, or not.
We have a technology called High Color that will be in Windows 7 that aims to solve this problem. In High Color, color data is all first converted into an extended range color space that uses the sRGB primaries, but which allows values less than 0.0 and greater than 1.0 (let’s call it sRGB-XR). High Color is closely related to xvYCC and Sony’s xvColor. Wide gamut color data can be converted into this space without any loss. Displays (and display cards) that support High Color are required to be able to convert internally from this sRGB-XR space to their native color space. With High Color, un-color-managed RGB is treated as sRGB, which is unchanged when converted into the sRGB-XR space (it’s all in the [0..1] part of the encoding). But then High Color compliant devices will correctly map this into their native space, so the sRGB data doesn’t get over-saturated by being treated as though it were already in the display’s native wide gamut space (as happens now). And, any actual wide gamut image content gets properly mapped to take advantage of the display’s wide gamut. The plumbing for High Color is in Windows 7. However, the Desktop Window Manager was unable to implement High Color support in time (this requires the use of a fixed or floating point rendering surface), so the desktop won’t be using High Color, yet, in Win7. Maybe next time.
I wish I were able to give you more than excuses, explanations, and futures.
Best Regards,
Michael Bourgoin
( )Program Manager | Windows Experience Color & Imaging Team
Microsoft Corporation
LaurentAugust 9, 2009
Thank you!
What about LUT profile ? ICC v2.1 and ICC V4 ?
Be careful windows 7 displays with good color management in standard preview mode but not in full screen mode.
(sorry for my english BTW)
( )JohanAugust 9, 2009
What do you wonder about regarding LUTs and ICC versions?
( )AxelAugust 15, 2009
>So remember to always tag your images going to the web with the
>correct color profile to ensure that it looks the best.
Just my two cents: about 75-80% of web surfers use IE7/8, which ignores embedded profiles. The only way to ensure that your web pictures look good is to follow web standards by uplading them converted to sRGB, tagged if you like.
–Axel (author of a color-managed image viewer)
( )JohanAugust 18, 2009
You’re completely correct. IE7/8 does indeed cause color problems if used on a wide gamut display. Also Opera 9.x (don’t know about the coming Opera 10) lacks color management.
One can just hope that the intended target audience when publishing images online uses a color managed browser like Firefox or Safari if they are also using a wide gamut display.
I want to believe that they do.
Btw, your image viewer looked interesting, especially as it’s available for 64-bit, I’ll for sure take a closer look at it.
( )TomAugust 18, 2009
Thank you so much Johan!
I, too, use Photoshop CS4, a Spyder3 Elite, and the Dell 2408WFP, and was running into the exact problems you described in the beginning of your article. I’m working with photographs, instead of 3D renders, but the concepts are identical. After working for hours on retouching some photos in Photoshop, I would export/upload them, only to be appalled by the oversaturated results!
Thanks to you, I finally understand WHY this is happening, and can now export and upload images with confidence, and am able to verify the results with a color-managed browser such as Firefox 3.5
Thanks again for your excellent write-up
-Tom
( )JohanAugust 18, 2009
Hi Tom,
I’m happy you found it helpful. Those color differences can drive you insane until you get what’s going on, at least me was ready to check in to an asylum there for a while.
Nice photos by the way!
Cheers!
( )Johan
MarkusAugust 19, 2009
Wonderful and comprehensive summary. One question: when printing, which printer would deliver a gamut in line with a wide gamut display ? I use a LaCie 724 in AdobeRGB for Photoshop and realize (in soft prooofing and real prints) how much some colors fade away using a Canon Pixma iP4500.
Thanks for the input again.
( )JohanAugust 20, 2009
Hi,
Glad you liked the article.
Anyway, I’m not that much into print, but I happen to have the same printer as you, the Canon Pixma iP4500, and it’s pretty decent in printing colors within the AdobeRGB Gamut. Here’s my printing methods from Photoshop, which I think works out quite okay.
Method1:
When printing from Adobe Photoshop CS4, in the print dialogue, make sure Color Management is set to Document (and it should also indicate it’s in AdobeRGB), and that color handling set to Printer Manages Colors.
And here comes the “trick”, when clicking print and you come to the OS system printing dialogue, go into the Canon driver properties and set the paper type and quality (Use custom for Print Quality so you can push it to the highest, quality 1). And then the most important setting, in the Color Adjustment section, change from Auto to Manual and go into the settings dialogue. There you can change the color management to ICM, and now your image hopefully should get properly printed.
Method2:
Another option if you want Photoshop to handle the color conversions, you can change Printer Manages Colors to Photoshop Manages Colors in the Photoshop Printer dialogue.
Then for printer profile, you can select one of Canons included ICC profiles for the iP4500. The provided ICC profiles has somewhat of cryptic names though, but here’s a breakdown of what each default ICC profile is made for:
* Canon iP4500 Series GL2 – Glossy Photo Paper Quality 2
* Canon iP4500 Series GL3 – Glossy Photo Paper Quality 3
* Canon iP4500 Series MP2 – Matte Photo Paper Quality 2
* Canon iP4500 Series PR1 – Photo Paper Pro Quality 1
* Canon iP4500 Series PR2 – Photo Paper Pro Quality 2
* Canon iP4500 Series PR3 – Photo Paper Pro Quality 3
* Canon iP4500 Series SP2 – Photo Paper Plus Glossy Quality 2
* Canon iP4500 Series SP3 – Photo Paper Plus Glossy Quality 2
So go with the appropriate ICC profile from the selection above in Printer Profile dropdown, and then select Rendering Intent (usually Relative Colorimetric) and disable Black Point Compensation and you are ready to press print.
When you come to the system OS printer dialogue this time, change the printer properties to use the same paper type as the ICC profile you selected. The same for the quality, set it to custom and then the same as the selected profile. And in the Color Adjustment’s Manual Settings, disable ICM and set it to None.
These methods should hopefully at least get your prints pretty close to the AdobeRGB gamut with the Pixma iP4500.
Oh, and you can also use the Canon provided ICC profiles for soft proofing in Photoshop. Just go to Proof Setup -> Custom and select the Canon profile for the paper type you’ll use and deselect “Preserve RGB Numbers” so you can select a rendering intent instead.
Hope this helps somewhat.
( )Cheers!
MarkusAugust 21, 2009
That is more than I expected as a feedback!
Actually I used exactly both methods so far and the blue tones in softproofing and in prints do not make it to a match with the screen picture. That´s why I asked.
Maybe you can help on another one: I was curious to see whether Itunes is color managed. So I took an untagged picture opened it in firefox and in IE and copied it into the cover section of Itunes. To my big surprise they were copied as they were shown in the browsers: i.e. the color managed photo from Firefox was appearing color managed in Itunes and the non corrected photo from IE was appearing oversaturated in Itunes. If Itunes would be color managed I would have expected both pictures to be like in Firefox and consequently if it is not color managed both pictures to be oversaturated.
So I have 2 questions:
1. Would you know whether Itunes is color managed ?
2. Why would a copy from IE to Itunes leave the photo uncorrected and from Firefox leave the photo corrected ?
Thnaks for helping
Markus
( )JohanAugust 25, 2009
Hi again Markus,
I’ve never used Itunes, so I don’t know if it’s color managed. Easiest way to try it would be to make an image in Photoshop with bright reds, assign an sRGB profile to it, which reduces the reds on screen. And then save it and open it up in Itunes and see if the reds are still in sRGB or if they are overly bright again.
My guess is when you copy and paste an image to Itunes, it copies it as it sees it on the screen, the copy from Firefox already has pixels compensated to your monitor, which then would tag along to Itunes, whereas IE hasn’t. But this is just my assumption as I haven’t actually tried Itunes so don’t quote me on it.
Johan
( )Peter PageSeptember 5, 2009
Thank you for this very helpful and well organized information. I just bought an HP LP2475w monitor that calibrates very nicely, but while experimenting with it I discovered that if I set the colour temperature to 6400K in the OSD, the oversaturated look of applications that are not colour aware goes away and in fact the colours are so accurate that there is almost no difference when I view an image within Photoshop CS4 or use a viewer that is not colour managed. As 6400K is a reasonable colour temperature for viewing images, I wondered if there were any reasons I haven’t thought of for not chaning the monitor’s colout temperature to 6400K. Your comments on this would be very appreciated.
Thanks again,
( )Peter
Brian ZimmermanSeptember 7, 2009
Interesting article, Johan. I’ve learned to deal with many of the same CM issues for editing/viewing/printing photographs since I got my HP2275 wide gamut monitor about six months ago. Color management is not always an “all or none” thing. For example, on your last page, I was glad to see you mentioned Irfanview, which only recently became fully color managed. That is, it can now utilize not only a color profile embedded in the image, but also the current default monitor profile. So, as wide gamut monitors become more prevalent, some software that might have previously been thought to be “color managed” is revealed to be only partially color managed if they cannot make use of the monitor profile. This distinction is not always obvious without a wide gamut monitor. Fortunately, Irfan recognized the importance of this and added the ability to use the monitor profile to his file viewer, so that it is now a fully color managed application.
Also, you may want to qualify your comment about the Firefox browser version 3.5, since it is no longer always fully color managed. Apparently, as you can read in the Mozilla release notes and bug reports for the recent versions of 3.5.x, by switching from LCMS to QCMS for color management, they lost the ability to support the latest version 4 of ICC profiles, so only the older version 2 is supported. This was not a problem for Firefox version 3.0.x, which I still use. In this regard, I have noticed that the Gretagmacbeth Eye One Match 3 software used with the Eye One Display 2 colorimeter for calibration/profiling monitors offers a choice between ICC profile version 2 or 4 formats, so Firefox 3.5 users who use this calibrator may want to take note.
Finally, which is how I got to your article in the first place – while searching for info on Spyder 3 – I cannot understand why Spyder products make it so difficult, if not impossible, to adjust your monitor luminance to a user-selected value, such as 120 candelas per meter squared (cd/m^2). I have never used the product, but from what I can see posted on various websites, it appears to be impossible with the Pro version, and even with the Elite version the default appears to be “visual”, not “measured”. Is that correct? It seems to me that for accurate luminance, the brightness should be measured and adjusted to a specified value using monitor hardware controls and not left to the software. The Eye One system does this routinely using the advanced calibration mode. I also wonder if the Spyder products allow you to adjust the individual RGB channels using monitor controls to achieve the desired white point balance.
Congratulations on a great article and your excellent artwork!
( )-Brian
JohanSeptember 16, 2009
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your useful comment and your information.
About your question concerning the Spyder calibration. The Spyder 3 Elite software let’s you select if you select between visual or measured for the luminance mode. If you use the default presets I believe all of them are set to visual, but if you make your own calibration profile and set up your own settings you can use measured instead and define your own value.
And it does also let you use and adjust the individual RGB channels if you wish to to that. I’ve only played around and experimented some with those settings myself, just to get a feel for what’s possible with the software and the device, but ended up using the kind of straightforward 6.5K/Gamma 2.2 preset, as it gave me a good result that I felt happy with. Quick and easy for me.
Thanks for the information about the Firefox 3.5. I have went with the ICC v2 profile when calibrating, there is an option for v4 in Spyder as well, but I haven’t tried it. Does v4 provide any advantages over v2?
( )/Johan
joojaaSeptember 18, 2009
>> assume that the display is within the sRGB range
Actually that’s not it. They assume no such thing they just send out signal 1 to 1 waht the value says. So imagine having 3 slider system. And then the instruction says All 3 sliders to max that’s what you do.
But a color management system sees a more complex instruction where there is information of what the size and offset of thos e sliders are going to be.
So having a 1 meter long slider to the max is presumably a bit different than having a 10m long slider to the max.
Most systems outside your color management system that have some rudimentary calibration behind them assume SRGB. this applies to scanners and cameras. But not applications that are not color managed.
( )DrennenOctober 23, 2009
Thank you so much for your article, this all made a TON of sense, trying to figure out why my images were oversaturated outside of Photoshop. I use an Acer AL2616W which is a wide-gamut monitor.
However, my images as seen over Firefox 3.5 are oversaturated. I have done some tests that prove my Firefox is respecting ICC profiles on images. What it does not appear to be doing is using my monitor profile.
From your article, it sounds like you are saying an image should look the same in Photoshop or Firefox. Is that right? Are we sure that Firefox respects the monitor profile? And do you have any advice for me getting my copy to respect it?
Thanks,
( )Drennen
DrennenOctober 23, 2009
Oh jeez. I just tested using my own webserver and can plainly see that Firefox 3.5 is using the monitor profile on my machine. The real problem is how oversaturated it looks on Flickr. So nevermind on the Firefox question and thanks for the great post.
If flickr, a photographers website, strips the ICC profile, Im having a hard time understanding why they would do that.
( )SebastienOctober 30, 2009
Thanks for the great post.
I’m using a Dell C22W (Crystal) Wide Gamut. I can’t find any profile for this monitor, but I calibrated it using Huey Pro, and the resulting profile seems to be v4. I had no success with either FF 3.0.15 or 3.5.2 or 3.6beta (3.5.2 only supports v2 though).
I opened a RAW (DNG) photo in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS4 on Win64, then created two JPEG, one with a sRGB embedded profile, another in Adobe RGB. All 3 of them look pretty much identical when displayed in Lightroom / Photoshop, i.e. color managed correctly. Good. Both sRGB and Adobe RGB JPEG files look oversaturated in FireFox or Safari. Ouch. If I disable color management, only the sRGB is oversaturated, the Adobe RGB looks fine, which is expected since it is sent unmanaged to my wide-gamut monitor.
My feeling is that even though FF claims to support v4 profiles, they might not be supported correctly (bugs happen, it’s fine, and that’s why we report them). If Lightroom or Photoshop can do it, then there is a way to do it, right? I think maybe it has to do with LUT based profiles, but I don’t think Huey Pro has the flexibility to create different kind of profiles…
( )JohanOctober 31, 2009
Yes, Firefox supported v4 profiles before version 3.5, but in version 3.5 they changed the color management engine, so they now only support v2 profiles. I haven’t seen anything mentioned if/when they plan to support v4 profiles again.
( )In the Spyder software (which I use), there’s a setting in the advanced options to switch between v2 or v4 profiles. Perhaps the Huey Pro has a similar setting somewhere that allows you to create v2 profiles instead?
jinNovember 5, 2009
holy cow,
thanks much johan. i’m doing work for the first time that’s going film-out (wheeee!) and trying to wrap my head around color management was confusing as heck until i found your article! you really deserve a tremendous amount of credit for cracking open this black art for the rest of us. stu maschwitz has some good stuff as well but he didn’t talk about renders from 3d and that’s the stuff i’ve been dealing with.
a few questions:
- i cannot “convert to profile” in after effects on a 32bpc open-exr file. the option is grayed out. is this normal? is this a limitation because it doesn’t seem like it should be and it is not documented. i can convert 16bpc and 8bpc fine though.
- if i do NOT use “proof colors” and “proof setup” with monitor rgb, the colors that i see in photoshop look nothing like what the colors should be or at least what was rendered from lw. so in that case, how would i “soft proof” inside of photoshop?
- in after effects, how do you “soft proof” if your project setting’s work space is something like film? for every profile that i select there, the colors look different on my monitor though i though AE was going to do somekind of magical autoconvert to my monitor’s color space so i can work.
if it does NOT do that, then wouldn’t it make sense to work in your monitor’s colorspace and then convert to destination color space only on output settings?
————————————
anyway, thanks again. this is a tremendous resource!
jin
( )JohanNovember 5, 2009
Hey Jin,
Happy you found it useful.
So, let’s see if I can answer you on the top of my head.
1. Convert to profile – That doesn’t sound normal. It should work just fine with 32bpc. I’m currently working on a film shot myself, and did just that earlier today with 32bpc exr files coming from LightWave. Are you using AE CS4 or an older version?
I’m not sure how well AE deals with exr files in earlier versions.
3. (switching order here) In AE when working for film, you should keep your working space to 32bpc and use a universal profile with a large gamut. ProPhoto RGB used to be a good choice (and still is), and in CS4 you have the new Universal Camera Film Printing Density profile to work with (which I currently use myself).
Then use the Simulate Output function in the View menu to compensate the view in AE to see how the colors will end up in the final destination.
Adobe has a preset Universal Camera Film to Kodak 2383 which is most common in the Output Simulation, but you can easily set up your own output with the custom setting. Where you can setup both the negative film stock (output profile) which in the case of 3D the universal profile is useful, and the distribution film stock (simulation profile) if you know on what stock your footage is going to end up on. And you will get a good representation of how the final look will be when projected on screen.
2. And you second question about Photoshop, same thing there, assign the profile of you footage when importing (also usually Universal Camera Film Printing Density). Which will make the image pretty dark, so in Proof Setup, use a custom setup with ProPhoto RGB as the device to simulate, uncheck preserve RGB numbers and use Absolute Colorimetric as the rendering intent. Highlights might be clipped (visually only) with this setup, but it should give you the best representation of the film footage inside Photoshop.
To match the look from LightWave, you can either first convert the render from the monitor profile into your film density profile, or use the SG_CCFilter in LightWave to soft proof against the film stock profile and then do the final render without SG_CCFilter applied, and it should come in correctly when assigning the film stock profile in AE/PS.
Hope this helps.
And congrats on the film-out job, adds some spice to the craft when going to film.
Cheers,
( )Johan
jinNovember 5, 2009
hiya johan,
thanks! that’s just what i needed to know!
oh, but in question 1, it’s in photoshop, not in AE. and i’m using photoshop cs4 (ae cs3).
in photoshop, if i open an open exr 32bpc file, the “convert to profile” is greyed out.
if i convert the file to 16bpc or 8bpc, the button comes ungreyed and i can do it but it won’t work on 32bpc.
is that normal?
thanks again and yah, can’t wait to see some of my stuff on the big screen. : )
jin
( )jinNovember 5, 2009
AHHHHH!
VIEW>SIMULATE OUTPUT!!!
that’s the missing piece of the puzzle for me! do you talk about this in your article? cuz other articles too, they generally stop at the -identify profile of asset -determine working space.
and then my brain is going nuts asking the same question… but but… won’t that look all messed up to me on my monitor if my work space is not the same as my monitor?!?!
as for the photoshop solution… ok cool – so you DO use ‘proof view’ ‘proof setup’. but just NOT monitor RGB. i got the impression that you were not supposed to use the proof view at all!
aha!
thank you so much johan, that totally clears things up for me!
jin
( )JohanNovember 5, 2009
No, now when you mention it, I don’t think I’ve written anything about the output simulation. Must have slipped my mind when writing – the article did get a bit longer than I had intended anyway.
Ah, okay, you meant in Photoshop, then that’s the correct. Convert to Profile is grayed out in 32bpc. There’s a few tools that don’t work in 32bpc in Photoshop, but much less in CS4 than in CS3 where almost no tools worked with 32bpc. I wouldn’t be surprised if Convert to Profile will work with 32bpc in CS5 though.
Yes, Monitor RGB is useless as a proof view as it doesn’t proof for anything outside your own system. But other than that proof view is a handy tool to check the output. Both for print and for film work.
( )PhilippNovember 14, 2009
Hey There!
I do not want to be repetative, but this is a fantastic (!!!) article! I’m very thankfull that you have gone through all of this confusing stuff and giving us a perfect sumary to work and learn from! Thx!!
But one Question is still not solved for me, maybe you could help me out of my mess here:
I have got a HP LP2475w and i’m not sure how i should calibrate him in the Color Settings within the OSD. I read an article on http://www.prad.de (http://www.prad.de/new/monitore/test/2008/test-hp-lp2475w-teil11.html unfortunately german only) which says that you can either have a good output of the monitor for sRGB or for Adobe RGB to get the smallest possible deltaE for each space. They tell you to set up different R, G, B and brightness values to achive this. The settings differ not much, but they do.
sRGB: Brightness 13, Contrast 80, Red 255, Green 236 und Blue 255.
Adobe RGB: Brightness 7, Contrast 80, Red 255, Green 236 und Blue 255.
They use reduced green values becaus the monitor drifts a bit to “green” (not sure if you can say it like this in english…sorry for that). The low brigthness is because the monitor has his best contrast ratio on that setting.
So now i’m not sure which settings to use. I also own a DataColor Spyder2 Express Colorimeter .
The question now is: Should i set up the monitor like prad suggested? And if yes…for which color space? sRGB? Adobe RGB? Or should i just use my spyder2express for calibration and not touching the settings of the monitor at all?
Once the monitor is calibrated and ready for use, the following workflow is (thanks to you!) cristal clear!
I would be very glad if you could give me any hints what to do
Best regards, Philipp
( )JohanNovember 16, 2009
Hi Philipp,
I’m happy you found it useful.
About changing the OSD color settings, I’ve read several articles as well concerning my display of different recommended settings, but I haven’t really cared about them as no two screens are exactly the same anyway.
I have left my monitor at it’s factory default settings and then let the Spyder do the job. The Spyder calibration sets the White Point (Balance) and the Gamma correct, but doesn’t mess with the colors. But when the gamma and calibration is correct the monitor can be correctly measured to create a correct profile so all color aware applications will display images correctly.
If the monitor is too far off so it can’t be calibrated in software you might need to mess with the OSD settings though. (I’ve written a bit about that on page 2).
One advantage though by tuning the OSD settings is that you can maybe get somewhat more accurate representation of the colors in non color managed applications – but as the applications I personally depend on are color managed I haven’t really bothered with that. I can live with the saturated colors on the desktop and a few non color managed applications as that really doesn’t impact my work.
So if you’re only concerned with making sure you get the correct representation of colors when working in Photoshop and similar programs, you can probably just skip messing with spending lot’s of time trying to tune in your monitor and just let the Spyder do it’s work.
Cheers!
( )PhilippNovember 16, 2009
Wow! What a quick reply! Thx Johan, now im perfectly set! You saved the day again!
Cheers from Austria!
( )MattNovember 23, 2009
This is the single greatest article series on Wide Gamut monitors and colors on the internet. They should have bundled this with my NEC 2690 instead of the manual. I experienced this exact same problem after installing and calibrating my monitor. Reading up on the potential problems, I found myself having an existential-like nightmare (I didn’t know what was ‘real’ color and what was distorted)…I had no idea if it was the monitor, the calibrator, the OS, Photoshop, or what. After much frustration, I found hundreds of forum threads on dozens of web sites all describing the same problem, and although I got it sorted before I read your article, you do leaps and bounds better than anyone on explaining it. Terrific job, my friend.
( )LewisNovember 28, 2009
I have a problem, i dont know if you can help me, anyway.
( )My problem is that after i finish converting a 32 picture to an 8, i click ok, and then, everything i’ve done just go out, and a overgammed picture comes out that i have to correct through gamma settings to obtain a “similar” picture to the one that was shown to me in preview; this is using hdr conversion through “local adaptation”. Do anyone knows how can i fix this?. Thanks…
edgeDecember 15, 2009
Extraordinary great article! – I wont post anymore praise although you deserve it.
Here is my question for the APPLE world: (using a wide gamut HP LP2475w monitor)
Final Cut Pro and Apple Color are of course “color managed” – but they are managed automatically and dont have options like AE to select the right color space. (After Effects works great on MacOS 10.6 with above described by the way)
Resulting in red faces in FCP and Apple Color. Which is a pity since the monitor would be good enough to approx. do some real color grading (possible in After Effects).
Is there ANY way to force FCP / Color to use the profile After Effects uses? / any other workaround?
Thanks ind advance – and I am sure there are lots of Apple’s out there who would love to get the answer for that.
( )Naca-YodaDecember 17, 2009
Okay… I thought I had it all sorted, until I took a screenshot and pasted it into a new Photoshop document. Urgh, desaturated. What’s gone wrong?
I have two monitors: Wide Gamut Dell 2407WFP-HC and an old Dell E173FP which I assume is not wide gamut.
I’m running Windows 7 (64bit) and before that Windows XP (in XP colour management did not seem to be a problem!).
This is the first time I’ve experienced troubles, and I’m going quite mad trying to figure it out. There are too many places to make configuration changes!
Most of my work is for the Web, via Photoshop CS3.
I don’t really care about my monitor(s) displaying precisely calibrated colour. I have two, they don’t match, and between them I get a good idea about what general web users are likely to experience. They don’t match, but it is easy to see that they are displaying the same information. IE, If I drag a browser of Photoshop document from one into the other, the colour grade does not change (only minor differences in moniter brightness and contrast).
So my issues.
- Browsers all display websites consistantly. Same colour tones as people all around my in the office. Both monitors are the same.
- Take screenshot of website, open new Photoshop Document, Paste… and all the colours are desaturated. Why? I’ve got my default document colour profile set to sRGB… isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?
- If I set my View > Proof Colours to Monitor RGB then everything looks fine… but I’m not sure you condone that….
- Now, Save for Web and Devices. I need to set “Convert to sRGB” = on, right? And embed the ICC profile? I think that’s what you say in your article. This only looks okay if I have “Uncompensated Colour” set.
- Exported image looks fine when opened in a browser.
- Sound all wrong? It does to me. And when I open a random image (ie, Not a screenshot) and make the same settings, Oversaturation occurs when working in Photoshop and when exporting.
*cry* I still don’t know which way is up.
Are there System Profiles I should be changing to ensure my screenshots are taken correctly (I think the system is set to sRGB)? Then what should my settings be?
ps. If I set my Photoshop Working RGB to “Dell 2407WFP-HC” profile and turn everything else off (Proof Colours, Save for Web > Convert to sRGB) everything displays and exports and renders in a browser, perfectly.
Colour management for opening RGB documentes is set to Off… tat sounds wrong too
Help. Please.
( )JohanDecember 17, 2009
Okay, let’s see if I can give you some answers here.
> Take screenshot of website, open new Photoshop Document, Paste. and all the colours are desaturated. Why? I’ve got my default document colour profile set to sRGB. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?
This is the correct behavior. Remember that Windows in itself isn’t color managed, and that you have a wide gamut display. What happens in reality is that when windows and your graphic card sends an image to your monitor, the monitor uses it’s entire color span to display it. So when a signal says maximum of a certain color for a certain pixel, it is displayed as saturated as the monitor can. With no regards to color spaces. As your monitor can display colors much more saturated than sRGB, the image you see in front of you is oversaturated. This goes for all non color managed applications including the windows desktop and most web browsers.
When you take a screenshot, windows takes it from the graphic card’s memory with no idea that you have a wide gamut screen, and then you paste it in Photoshop in the sRGB range. This is where you experience undersaturated colors, but what you see in reality is how your screenshot looks in sRGB – as Photoshop is color managed and know what sRGB is supposed to look like and with a profile for your monitor it compensates the colors to give you a universal experience that should match between any correctly setup display. If you had a monitor that was within the sRGB range, this is what you actually would see when working in the windows desktop as well.
So one can say that you have by doing that converted your wide gamut desktop and screen into the sRGB color space to see it how it would look on any sRGB compliant display. This is good.
> If I set my View > Proof Colours to Monitor RGB then everything looks fine. but I’m not sure you condone that.
No, by doing that you are essentially skipping color management all together. What you get in Photoshop is exactly the same image as you see on your screen. But then this is not what other people will see that are looking at your image on a sRGB calibrated / profiled system.
So you should keep pasting your images into a sRGB document and have in mind that your desktop is oversaturated outside of Photoshop and other color managed applications because of your wide gamut display, and the “undersaturated” look you get in Photoshop is how your desktop would have looked on a non wide gamut screen.
And by doing that you can be pretty sure that your image will look more or less the same on most monitors out there, and for sure on those that have calibrated and profiled theirs.
> Now, Save for Web and Devices. I need to set “Convert to sRGB” = on, right? And embed the ICC profile?
Yes, convert to sRGB is when you have worked with your image in another color space, like Adobe RGB. In the past you had to convert it in Photoshop before saving for web to make sure it looked correct. Now you don’t have to do that, but the save for web dialogue can do it for you by checking that box. Very handy. Embedding a sRGB profile adds a few extra kb to the image, but by doing that color managed web browsers (Firefox and Safari at this time) will display the image correctly, if the visitor has a calibrated and profiled display.
Starting with Flash Player 10 also flash player can display images color managed, in all browsers. That’s the main reason I implemented a flash viewer for my portfolio pages on my site recently, to make sure my images are as correctly displayed as possible for my viewers, no matter if they use a color managed browser or not. Color management in flash was my favorite addition to flash player 10, and hopefully a push for IE and Opera to implement it as well to rid all the problems with the web and the more and more common wide gamut displays once and for all.
>Sound all wrong? It does to me. And when I open a random image (ie, Not a screenshot) and make the same settings, Oversaturation occurs when working in Photoshop and when exporting.
If you open a random image in Photoshop, make sure it has a profile assigned to it. Most images of the rack are supposed to be in the sRGB color space. You can assign the profile manually or set Photoshop to ask you to assign a profile whenever you open a document that are missing one. Check out page 3 in this article for some information of how to set that up.
Hope this helps you to understand what’s going on.
Cheers!
( )Naca-YodaDecember 18, 2009
Okay… I thought I understood, but some simple tests tell me I do not.
My two tests are:
1. To take a screenshot of this website: http://www.nissan-zeroemission.com/EN/ and to paste it into Photoshop (in an sRGB working space document) and retain the colours I see in my standard gamut (or wide gamut for that matter) screen. I need to work with the file in the colour spectrum it will be displayed in, on the non-wide gamut screen, but as it is, the blues turn purple. Fail.
2. Download this photo of a tiger http://www.dailydigitalphoto.com/potd-images/potd/FocusedSiberian.jpg and open it in Photoshop. Assign an sRGB profile to it so it is Managed (ie, convert it to the sRGC working space) then save it for web and successfully display it as it was beforehand. This also fails. I am prompted to assign the working sRGB profile when I open the file, which displayed it as it is seen in the browser on the standard monitor. Good. Then I Save for web with “Convert to sRGB” ticked and view it on the same screen and browser as the original. The new image is desaturated further than the original.
Maybe mine is a unique situation?
What am I doing wrong?
( )MichaelDecember 18, 2009
Great Stuff.
I have a Apple 23″ Cinema Display (5 years old now), that’s starting to show its age, becoming quite “warm” (whitepoint ~5200K). So I borrowed a friends i1 display 2 to calibrate it back to 6500K.
In the calibration options I can choose to have a v2 or v4 ICC profile, and either a “Small (matrix)” or “Large (LUT)” profile.
Based on your comments, I believe v2 / large would be the way to go, correct? (as there is more support for v2 profiles currently).
Unfortunately, the resulting “calibration” makes the screen much darker (~90cd/m2), presumably to get enough blue to get the whitepoint back to 6500K. (and indeed, looking at the LUT curves, this is exactly what has happened). So perhaps I’ll live with a 5500K whitepoint or something until I get a new monitor!
Having read your article, there is still one thing I find confusing: the calibration software modifies the graphics card’s LUT table to show “accurate” colours. Why then the need for a profile? If the screen is showing accurate colours, Photoshop shouldn’t need to make any adjustments at all….
… aaaaaand now I think I see the answer to my question… the LUT adjustment curves just create an accurate gamma response for the target gamma and white point *based on the monitor’s measured gamut*. We still need to map the monitor’s gamut to the document gamut (sRGB, Adobe RGB etc), and this is what is in the ICC profile.
Is this right?
(And if so, why have a LUT in the profile, instead of just the monitor’s RGB primaries?)
Hope you can help clear the confusion!
Mike
( )JohanDecember 20, 2009
Yes, you got it completely correct there at the end. It’s just the gamma and white point that get’s modified through the graphic card’s LUT. This brings the monitor into a known state, so the profiling software knows that it’s set at these specific values correctly when measuring the colors to create the ICC profile for the monitor to be used in Photoshop etc for proper mapping into color spaces.
So it’s basically two stages: Calibration (gamma and white point) and then Profiling (measuring the colors after the calibration has been made).
Cheers!
( )Johan
JohnJanuary 13, 2010
I’m so sick of Picasa displaying colors wrong on my new wide gamut dell 3008 monitor. It’s really frustrating!
Why did microsoft get away with designing a system that relies on the application to consult the monitor profile? Why can’t there be a windows-wide software solution to make non color managed (indeed ALL) apps behave properly? I guess that would mean telling photoshop not to colour manage.
Why can’t this be done at a software level? Why is color management so messed up? And why won’t picasa implement it? The program is all but useless to me now I’ve bought a decent screen…
( )Todd KoprivaJanuary 15, 2010
I just added a comment to this page of After Effects Help to point people to this great article:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS14AC4DDE-84D7-4fc9-B79C-897F2C78EA29a.html
I encourage you to do likewise whenever you publish something relevant to After Effects.
Keep up the great work!
( )MartinJanuary 15, 2010
Thanks a lot for this great article.
I’m currently using an Eizo Cg241W(ide Gamut) on Mac OS X and had those exact same problems. I’m loving the wide gamut display for my photoshop work, especially if it goes to print, but using cinema 4D always gave me headaches. Never even thought of using the monitorprofile for renders, instead I often use my old Apple Cinema Display for working in Final Cut and other non color managed applications.
One question though: Did you ever use a breakout card and a video monitor for grading and editing? I really wonder how well a job a device like the Matrox Mini in combinatioin with a low cost hdmi monitor does.
Thanks again Johan and all the best.
( )martin
JohanJanuary 15, 2010
Martin,
I used to work with an external reference monitor in the past, but I haven’t done so for years as the kind of work I do now rarely sees the need for it. Using the proofing in After Effects works fine most of the time and saves me some money and equipment.
So I don’t really have any clue how far the Matrox Mini with a low cost hdmi monitor will take you with color accuracy, sorry.
Cheers,
( )Johan
MartinJanuary 15, 2010
Thanks Johan for the quick reply,
( )if I get one of those matrox boxes, I’ll let you know about it’s ups and downs.
Adam ShahidJanuary 17, 2010
This guide has been incredibly useful. There is one thing though that I’ve run into that hasn’t been covered here. Perhaps it is an error on my part, or perhaps a problem with my hardware… but:
After calibrating with the Spyder3Elite on my Dell U2410 wide gamut monitor (which I’ve configured to sRGB.. I know, I know, but I do mostly webwork), I *must* go into Windows Vista Color Management and manually set ’sRGB IEC61966-2.1′ if I want to get proper colors in sRGB files. If I don’t, and use the profile generated by the Spyder3, then every sRGB image in color-managed applications has a sickly yellow cast. I’m guessing that there is a problem with ‘double profiling’ in my system. This only happened once I installed the Dell U2410 monitors.
Keep in mind, I use ‘Profile Chooser’ to first set the profile created by the Spyder3 software, which seems to update the video card LUT. Then I go into windows color management and manually set to sRGB, so that color-managed applications don’t look horrible.
Have you ever heard of a situation where in order to get images to display properly with imbedded sRGB profiles, one must manually set sRGB in Vista’s Color Management settings? This is *after* calibrating with a Spyder3Elite…
My Spyder3Elite generates *atrocious* profiles that cause sRGB-tagged images to show with a yellow cast on my new wide gamut Dell U2410 monitors. I have to use profile chooser to set the LUT with the Spider3’s profile, then manually set ’sRGB IEC61966-2.1′ within Window’s Color Management in order to get sRGB images to show normally.
I think there may be some sort of double profiling issue going on, but I can’t seem to figure out how. Adobe Gamma is definitely *not* running.
Thanks!
( )JohanJanuary 18, 2010
Hi Adam,
I haven’t seen this particular problem before, sorry. But I do remember seeing in the changelog history of the Spyder 3 Elite software that earlier versions of the software had problems with Vista, that the profiles loaded in the wrong order. And that this problem was noted as fixed in a later update.
That’s the only thing I can think of at the top of my head.
Have you downloaded and installed the latest version of the Spyder 3 Elite software from Datacolor’s website? If not, doing that might do the trick for you.
Cheers,
( )Johan
Christopher ProsserJanuary 19, 2010
Hi,
Great article. I’ve done pretty much the same setup with my HP LP2480zx and my LP2475w.
Why did we switch our recommendation from AdobeRGB to the Film Profile for linear work? Probably because most people doing linear work when we wrote that paper were outputting to DCI, or DPX for film printing. Keeping the primaries the same between the output color space and the working space is one fewer places where the ICC color engine needs to interpret colors on your behalf.
Also, gamut is somewhat misleading in a floating point color space. Traditionally gamut is limited by the color components maxing out at 1. With a floating point color, you never max out, and colors can even go negative, which is very confusing from a human vision perspective
. Keeping all colors positive can help downstream, so it generally makes sense to have your working space match your output space if at all possible. You can even linearize sRGB if all your work is just ending up on the web.
–chris prosser
( )after effects engineering manager
MichaelFebruary 6, 2010
thanks for the post. It was indeed very useful.
( )could you please clarify what kind of settings I need for RED camera files.
JohanFebruary 6, 2010
Michael,
I haven’t used the RED camera myself, so I don’t have any experience with those particular files. But take a look at this blog post over at Adobe, http://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/2008/12/native_red_camera_files_cs4.html
It walks through working with RED camera files in Premiere and After Effects CS4 and what settings to use.
Cheers!
( )Johan
Achmed RaschFebruary 7, 2010
great article. looks like you have invested alot of time into this subject. thank you…
( )