Very interesting.
Does that mean that I am stuck to sRGB profile when seeing my images? Having an RGB monitor??
What if I select RGB, and not “display profile”?
Indeed, as you suggest, when I choose “display profile” I get similar output as sRGB.
Thanks.
Hmm, what you are showing is just the list of profiles supplied by darktable, plus the system monitor profile. You’d have to put a copy of your actual monitor profile in a folder where darktable can find it. My apologies, I know the location on Linux, but not on Mac.
On Mac, as @houz commented, the system monitor profile is probably sRGB. @Carmelo_DrRaw - can you confirm? I think you were looking into this problem at one point, yes? Is this problem “general” or just confined to gtk apps?
As an aside, as far as I know all monitors have “RGB” profiles - they all use additive color mixing to make different colors. So specifying “RGB” isn’t enough to narrow things down to a specific monitor profile. For example sRGB is an RGB profile.
Choosing AdobeRGB as the monitor profile isn’t the right choice unless the Eizo is actually calibrated to AdobeRGB - “whatever % coverage” of AdobeRGB isn’t the same as “calibrated to AdobeRGB”.
Thanks for your reply.
Mac is the operating system, but I use a different monitor. Yes, it’s an Eizo full RGB profile, it is not sRGB. I attach the specific color profile, if of any help.
It is calibrated through external profiler (i1Pro) via internal monitor’s software.
So, I guess my choice is indeed to choose Adobe RGB color profile as working profile.
Alternatively, how could I make darktable read my .icc attached??
Thanks.
CS2420(36884057)00000002.icc (3.7 KB)
I still have no idea what you mean when you say “RGB”.
Go to https://www.darktable.org/usermanual/en/lighttable_chapter.html#lighttable_overview and look for setting the display color profile.
Bug 681784 – colorspaces used in gtk+ and cairo quartz backends do not match might explain some more details.
Indeed, this is some kind of limitation of GTK apps. More precisely, in cairo-quartz-surface.c it is assumed that the input data is in sRGB format, and the transform to the display ICC profile is handled by Cairo itself. As a consequence, any application using Cairo for display output is forced to convert the pixels to sRGB in order to get correct, but gamut-limited, colors.
For my OSX packages I am patching Cairo to bypass this limitation. The trick is simple: I am “fooling” Cairo to believe that the display profile is sRGB, so that it performs an identity conversion… this way, I can directly output pixel values in the display colorspace.
Hmm, checking the Eizo RGB XYZ values against AdobeRGB XYZ values, they really aren’t all that close, so I don’t think AdobeRGB would make a good substitute for an actual monitor profile:
rXYZ
eizo: X="0.62322998" Y="0.27453613" Z="0.00166321"
adobeRGB: X="0.60974121" Y="0.31111145" Z="0.01947021
gXYZ
eizo: X="0.19964600" Y="0.68313599" Z="0.06350708"
adobeRGB: X="0.20527649" Y="0.62567139" Z="0.06086731"
bXYZ
eizo: X="0.14131165" Y="0.04232788" Z="0.75971985"
adobeRGB: X="0.14918518" Y="0.06321716" Z="0.74456787"
Though perhaps on the xy plane xy values might be fairly close. If you are curious, see @ggbutcher 's xy plotter: xyY Horseshoe Plotter - #2 by afre
Anyway, here’s a screenshot from darktable, from the Lightroom tab:
See where it says “display profile” In Linux, hovering over those words shows you where darktable looks for display profiles. I don’t know about Mac.
Is “full RGB profile” perhaps an Eizo marketing phrase? I don’t think this phrase has any technical meaning.
@Matteo_Bertolino Yes, that is the first thing I would try to do; i.e., drop your screen’s profile in one of the directories listed in the tool tip when you hover over “display profile”.
Here’s the plot:
and, the input XYZs in exiftool output format:
RedMatrixColumn: 0.62322998 0.27453613 0.00166321
GreenMatrixColumn: 0.19964600 0.68313599 0.06350708
BlueMatrixColumn: 0.14131165 0.04232788 0.75971985
FileName: ezio
RedMatrixColumn: 0.60974121 0.31111145 0.01947021
GreenMatrixColumn: 0.20527649 0.62567139 0.06086731
BlueMatrixColumn: 0.14918518 0.06321716 0.74456787
FileName: adobeRGB
That was fun… 
Hi @ggbutcher - Nice plots!
That Eizo monitor profile seems to include all of AdobeRGB and then a fair bit more.
Hey!
Interesting indeed. But does that mean my Eizo has more gamut than Adobe RGB?? Sounds weird. It should, at best, be equal.
Now, either I find where to put my .icc color profile so that darktable can find it (anyone??), or I am better off choosing directly Adobe RGB from the given options.
Do you agree?
Thanks.
Reading here and there I found this, where the profiles should be places:
~/.config/darktable/color/in
the problem is having a Mac; I cannot find such folder with darktable icc profiles! The only darktable folders I found (thanks to this forum!) are the ones I attach.
Now, I even tried creating a new folder inside, called “color”, and another, called “in”, I places the .icc profile inside but, obviously, nothing, darktable does not see it.
Thanks.
You are on the right path and you have to create the folders if they do not exist. But the manual as link by @houz says you need to place profiles for the monitor into the folder out not in.
So it should be:
~/.config/darktable/color/out
Hi,
Not really. If I understand correctly the info given at the link above, and if darktable works like RawTherapee in this respect, then you should use “system display profile”, and tell the OS to use your icc profile (I don’t know how to do that on a mac, sorry).
You will not benefit from the wide gamut of your display unfortunately (the output will be clipped to sRGB), but at least you should see the “proper” colors (proper meaning as specified by your display profile).
I hope this is right, but I’m confident someone will correct me otherwise 
In a way, and given the above insights given by others, if darktable automatically converts everything to sRGB then any attempt of mine to install my .icc profile is useless.
If it was really so, welcome to another huge deficiency of the software. I feel.
I mean, come on, how can you not allow the software (a supposedly professional retouching program) to read a RGB profile?
This throws huge shadows on my ideas of switching from other software.
I really hope I am missing something…
Thanks.
I created the folder named “out”.
Still nothing… 
It’s a limitation of cairo on OSX and nothing darktable can fix on its own, the root cause being Apple having broken API.
Fine. Accepted.
But then, does that stick also if you have a second monitor plugged in, as in my case? I mean, it has its own color profile embedded. I don’t use at all the iMac monitor (broken).
And finally, why do I see the difference in darktable when switching from sRGB to RGB? From what I understand that difference should not be visible.
Thanks.
I’m just the messenger here, a hack programmer who figured out how to plot data he’s just beginning to understand…
That said, what you don’t see on these plots is the luminance range of the two profiles. I’ll leave it to @Elle to tell us what significance that might have.
From what I understand OSX does use the color profiles set in the system to map from the intermediate sRGB colors to your display space. So if everything works as intended you should have correct colors, even with more than one monitor, but they are restricted to the sRGB gamut.
That being said, I never had a computer running OSX, never really used OSX and surely have no idea about the things going on in the back there. So I might be totally wrong.
Again, what do you mean with RGB? Those are all RGB profiles, and none of them is labeled just “RGB”.
I actually managed to make darktable read my own .icc profile.
I created the folder and placed a copy of the profile inside.
Now, my profile is supposed to be an Adobe RGB profile, so I do not understand now the whole thing anymore, given that I see a clear difference now between my RGB profile and the sRGB.
Maybe Apple has changed?
So now I should work, I think, with my own .icc profile chosen among the different “display profile” options, then export with sRGB profile for web and similar. Am I ok?
Thanks
