@Danas_Anis: So you set the monitor to an internal sRGB mode? Did you also set sRGB as your system’s display profile? Maybe you just got used to the over saturated look of the wide gamut monitor?
@Morgan_Hardwood: Of course such a website only tests one piece of the puzzle, I just mentioned it because the question about browser support was brought up earlier. To help testing some other steps I would set the mentioned BRG profile as the display profile and see if image viewers and browsers show funny colors. That way you can make sure that the way they pick the used profile actually works.
And I just noticed that the image of the color circle embedded above is cached by this website and broken while doing so. I guess it just stripped the color profile which isn’t the best thing to do for a photography site. @patdavid, could you have a look if that can be fixed?
@Morgan_Hardwood I think too much information in this matter, I read the articles, but the more I read the deeper the wood becomes. They describe the principle of color calibration and management but still I am confused about per application basis stuff. As for color managed application, on my system the colors are wrong, they are more correct when I turn off color management or make application use sRGB profile instead. I can confirm that with printed images.
Well I guess I will go to print new images sometime this month and will check again, I no longer have previous prints But need to check things again, definitely skin tones on print are not as yellow as color managed apps show on my system…
@houz no, I am using an ICC profile system wide but get more correct colors when I turn of color management in Geeqie for example. When I turn on color management in Geeqie, I get colors of mud. Printed images on paper look far better (professional grade not home printer). And this result in confusion to me. If for example I make GIMP use system color profile, it seems like it puts away a lot of reds and I get yellowish skin tones instead of healthy Caucasian skin.
The reason I brought this topic is that since I heard that Firefox is color managed, I went to check my online published stuff using firefox and noticed the mud colors instead of nice tones, but that is with majority of images found on such websites like behance etc. I just got worried how should the images be prepared correctly so that they would be showed well on both color managed screens and not color managed screens. Not too red, not too yellow.
After years with calibrated monitor, I can;t stand the blue cast that is usually there when without the calibration on my screen so no way I am not using color calibration profiles on my screen. I am using a pretty old laptop, it has good screen but as with many laptops, without calibration non IPS panels are too blue. IPS and PLS panels show more correct colors out of the box usually, but still needs to be calibrated.
It’s somewhat depressing that 54% of AdobeRGB is considered “high-end” these days. I’m not critiquing your choice of term even for a second – instead I’m merely lamenting the state of the art at present. My impression is that in the days when a “high resolution display” was 1920x1280 or 1920x1080, an important part of what people took to be good quality was color gamut, but when manufacturers created 4K and 5K displays, for the most part gamut suffered badly, dropping precipitously. Only very recently is it becoming possible to once again find high-resolution displays with anything like an acceptable color gamut at a reasonable price.
Probably just as sad is the fact that lower-end 1080p displays these days, such as those found in the base-model Lenovo workstation laptops, have truly appalling color gamut coverage.
Maybe the root cause of this lamentable situation is commodity marketing and manufacturing cost, equivalent to where the great mass of largely uniformed decision-makers judge the quality of a camera based on mainly how many megapixels the sensor has. The manufacturers know better, but they’re under strong pressure to deliver massive volumes as cheaply as they can.
Personally I’m making do with my 2011 era Lenovo W520, which has good gamut coverage. I plan to run it until it one day stops, hopefully not any time soon
@Danas_Anis indeed, knowing when color management is working correctly is not a simple feat. I’ll just bounce some thoughts around, don’t feel compelled to answer the questions, it’s just something to think about:
You base your judgement that your color management is incorrect on the fact that the prints don’t look as yellow (as warm?) as what you see on screen. Who is to say that the prints are correct? Is the printer profiled correctly and are you using that profile and are you comparing the printout to a soft-proofed image?
Have you profiled your monitor yourself? If so, have you used the correct white point? The correct white point depends on the task at hand - you might use “native” for working on photos but 5000K for matching prints…
Is your colorimeter faulty? Is it designed to work well with your screen? Does it need any correction matrices?
Do these color-managed apps have correctly implemented color management?
Have you loaded the calibration curves (VCGT) into the video card? Your last paragraph makes it sound like you have. If you’re in Linux you can easily check: argyll-dispwin -c resets the VCGT which should make the screen look more blue, argyll-dispwin -L loads the calibration curves which should make it warmer.
@damonlynch yeah, Instagram seems to testify that people generally don’t give a hoot I still suffer a minor heart attack every time I upload a photo or panorama I spent hours on only to see it riddled with compression artifacts, have its chroma halved or quartered, and have its colors butchered by the social platform responsible for the crime.
I started drawing a chart that explains the basic high level steps. Maybe we can tweak it until there are no errors left and it’s clear enough to be of help.
I assumed that the image is in AdobeRGB color space and that the application has a working profile of sRGB (not true for darktable, but it’s just an example …).
Great approach, @houz. Thanks for taking this opportunity. There’s a lot of information on the internet about color management, but what is missing is a simple explanation of what is happening and why it happens. All those tutorials telling “press this button and edit this config file” do not really help understanding color management, but your approach could handle it.
Does that mean you are open for suggestions? I have got a couple:
For the basic understanding it is not important if the image is edited or only viewn, especially since you do not tell the differences when it comes to editing. Therefore I would suggest to skip this step to make the graphic less cluttered.
It may be useful to give a hint why the “vcgt icon” is black/white while the “profile icon” is colored.
Assuming that the profile is the result of a monitor calibration approach, the details about what the monitor does with the data (the “maybe” part) could be removed to make the info graphic as simple as possible, or footnotes could be introduced for these details that are practically important but not necessary for a basic understanding. That covers e.g. that GIMP has color management turned off by default as well.
If it does not make the image too cluttered, what about adding symbolic horseshoe diagrams that show 3 things: The color space in use at this step, the color coverage of the image (an example coverage) and 3 example pixels/colors (one that will be out of gamut in one of the steps).
@Morgan_Hardwood well, definitely the judgment is not made by any professional and science approved method. It is just that with a few colleagues we came to this conclusion, that the print house house I print images usually is the most accurate one from 5 different service providers. But it is just a measurement by eye. I actually don;t have the printer ICC profile, but whenever I print images, I go back home and check it next to the screen and I am never surprised of different colors, they always are pretty much same looking, print doesn;t glow so it is less bright. But I think I will check again using few different pictures, especially with those where I see major skin tone difference where I get reds be completely gone if I view the image with color management on.
I really wish to get things as right as I can.
My colleague profiled the screen. But it was long time ago, so definitely need for a new profile and calibration. But this old profile is better than having nothing. I have two profiles, older one is made with spyder 2 while newer one is made with spyder 3 but I like the older one better, spyder 3 gives a bit of yellow tint on the gray. I am looking to buy a colorimeter and have decided to go with Colormunki Display, but currently i don’t have funds for it cause I am planning on a photoshoot which will require some funding from my pocket…
I really am not sure whether color managed apps are implementing my profiles correctly. that is one of the reason for this forum topic. If I would color grade my images according to how they are showed when color management is on, not colored managed apps will show lobster red skin tones. If I color grade with color management turned off on GIMP and view the images on a color managed app, I get reds being muted ending up with some yellowish brown or mud tint. Probably my ICC profile is not being set up correctly on color managed apps. Or maybe it shows correct and I am doing it all not right, but then, if I print my images, I get what is expected according to my screen on not color managed app but with calibration on on the monitor. And I end up with confusion on how to work with color management on apps.
well I guess I will just have to comapre different images with print and screen with color managed app management on and off and when possible calibrate my monitor and see how the new profile works.
For some reason your provided commands didn;t work, says no such command found, but I know argyll cms is installed, other wise Dispcalgui wouldn’t work right?
Thank you everyone who participate in this topic, hopefully we will manage to make this subjected a lot more easy to understand.
Color management is there to avoid such unintended differences. Both profiles should match. If they don’t, either the procedure was done incorrectly, or was done with differing settings in software (e.g. different whitepoint in calibration).
dispcalGUI has a “Verification” feature, but I haven’t learned how to use it yet.
I can vouch for GIMP and RawTherapee’s color management implementation - latest development versions of both.
Why don’t you process a photo to look well with CM turned on and again with it turned off, then make both JPEGs available, and the raw file too just in case, so we can take a look? In that case upload the file using http://filebin.net/ so we can be sure they have not been changed in any way.
argyll-dispwin is also called just dispwin, try both.
Remember that your color profile is only valid with your monitor calibration - changing one invalidates the other.
My biggest obstacle regarding color management is being able to tell when I did it right.
@Danas_Anis I’m thinking about one possible way of checking if the colors displayed by your screen are correct: if you could find either a camera calibration target or some sample pantone color patches (possibly in the pink-ish range of skin colors), then you could find out the corresponding CIELab values and create an image filled with the same uniform Lab color. At this point you should be able to compare side-by-side the printed patch and your screen to see how good they match (please somebody correct me if I’m totally wrong here!).
…and neither of my two favorite Linux image viewers - Geeqie and Gwenview - support letting the user choose the rendering intent. Which sucks. Big time.
I discovered XNView the other day, I’m not sure whether it’s OSS but it’s definitely available in Darius Duma’s “Highly Explosive” PPA for Ubuntu and derivatives. It’s also cross platform meaning it’ll work with Linux, Mac or Windows.
And, you can also set the rendering intent!
I found Geeqie, well, too geekie for me. It seemed a bit counter intuitive and GUI messy, but XNView seems very straight forward by comparison.
Check it out. Like me, I’m sure you’ll be happy you did.
I’ve been using XnView on and off for a good 10 years, and it’s fine in Windows, but XnViewMP 0.72 didn’t fit well with other Linux apps and it had some bugs which made me return to Geeqie. I thought it was dead, as the main website still links to the changelog for 0.72 from 2014, but I found via the forum that there are newer versions, currently the newest is 0.78 from 2016-02-28, so I’ll give it another shot.
I am afraid to do it right 100% is complicated and expensive… Once I get a calibration device I will see how it works and how it’s icc files work. Will compare to the prints of the print house I print at and will decide how much truth the color managed app shows vs not color managed app but calibrated screen and will do some conclusions how to more forward. By reading more about color management in some blog I found a sentence in which it is said that it is a common issue with not fully or not correctly set up color management if color managed apps shows too yellow or mud like skin tones etc. Maybe it is true and maybe it is my case cause all I do is just load my ICC profile using displayCAL, nothing more.
Good thing is that now I read a lot more about color management, once things sink in to my brain I might be successful one day to make things be right
I tried XnView but Gwenview and Geegie are still my most liked image viewers. Especially after I figured out how to make Geeqie load multiple instances (Woohoo!) so I prefer its less cluttered interface ( I made it show only image with no additional tools for coping etc. it is faster and it is easy to enable and disable color management on the fly wish Gwenview had this feature…)
One thing to check (parts of) your setup is loading the BRG.icc profile I linked earlier as your are loading your current display profile and then check if your image viewer is showing “wrong” colors – red should become blue, green should become red and blue should be turned green. If that’s the case you know that loading the profile works and that the image viewer is correctly fetching the profile from the system and applying it.
Next you should reset the profile to your normal display profile (verify that images look normal again) and open an image like the color circle linked above (DON’T use the image embedded in the post, it’s broken by the forum software!). If the word “Rot” is shown in red, “Grün” in green and “Blau” in blue then your image viewer supports loading color profiles embedded in image files.
If both of these tests worked you can be confident that your setup is working. There is one thing that wasn’t tested: the graphics card’s LUT. Unfortunately I don’t have a profile with a test vcgt tag, maybe something with x=y for red and x=0 for green and blue would work, I’ll have a look if I can create such a profile and report back.
If you also want to test your image editor’s writing capabilities you should use the same BRG profile as the image profile for an exported JPEG. Then look at the image in your known good image viewer – it should look just normal. However, when looked at in an image viewer that you know doesn’t handle color management (I always use display from imagemagick) the colors should be off like in the first test.
Once you have gone through those three tests (they shouldn’t take longer than a few minutes) we migth be able to narrow down the problems with your setup.
I managed to find a few minutes to create a VCGT test profile. Loading it should make the screen turn red. It can be used to check if the system is properly setting the video card LUT when loading the system display profile.
I spent some time testing out XnView MP 0.78. It works well and correctly uses the chosen monitor profile and the chosen rendering intent (all set manually). I do recommend it.
Pity Geeqie doesn’t support monitor profile rendering intent selection.
I still suffer a minor heart attack every time I upload a photo or panorama I spent hours on only to see it riddled with compression artifacts, have its chroma halved or quartered, and have its colors butchered by the social platform responsible for the crime.
