darktable Laptop External Monitor Screen Profile- Windows 10

Software
1

Hi,

I’m struggling a bit with the display colour profiles using darktable in Windows 10. I have both my laptop panel and my external monitor calibrated with my Spyder and both screens running their own respective icc profile.

If I have darktable set to ‘System profile’ I get a colour shift when I move darktable between the two screens, leading me to believe that using ‘System Profile’ is only using 1 of the monitor icc profiles.

If I put my external monitor icc profile in ‘color’ ‘out’ folder and select that, the image becomes too red, leading me to think it’s then double profiling.

As I’m not running on Linux, I cannot run ‘darktable-cmstest’ to return which profile is being used for which monitor.

If it is using 1 single cal for both monitors, Is there a way to know which profile is being used as the ‘System profile’? I guess if I figure that out, I can somehow set it in a way that it will use the correct cal for my external monitor, then I can use my laptop screen for ‘softproofing’ applying the printer icc profile of choice…

Any help appreciated as it’s pretty important for me to get this sorted if I want to continue with dt!

2

Hi @DanielMarkland and welcome!

One good starting point could be the forum’s search engine:

3

Hi @Claes, thanks for the welcome.

The post you’ve highlighted popped up when I created mine. I read through it, but it looks to me like they’re doing what I’ve already done in loading the Spyder display icc into the ‘color/out’ folder and selected it in darktable that way. Doing this seems to me like it’s then double profiling and therefore still not correct.

It looks like there’s an open ‘To do’ in the Windows area on GitHub for secondary monitor colour, but in the meantime, I just need a way to ascertain with reasonable confidence, which profile is being used as the ‘system profile’. I’m sure I can then work around it.

4

You can assign to one of the monitors on Windows a clearly “wrong” profile, like the ones using for testing that have R and B switched. Then it should be easy to find out which is using.

5

Ahh I didn’t realise you could get purpose made ‘wrong’ profiles. That will do the job! Thanks for that!

6

@guille2306 Any idea where I can find such an icc file?

7

My observation is that since 3.0 (2.7-xxx) only the profile of monitor which is set as “main monitor” (in windows settings) is used (black windows appears there for a moment) when “system profile” is selected. Before, in 2.6 it was the profile of monitor on which dt was started.
The bug report is here: Windows: incorrect colors on secondary monitor · Issue #3619 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub

Both workarounds mentioned in the other thread works fine for me:

  • setting the second monitor as main monitor before dt start after it’s started, i can switch the main monitor back
  • or to set the profile manually in dt
8

These come from the colord installation in a Kubuntu 20.04 (license is CC0):

Bluish.icc (14.4 KB)
This profile adds a blue tint to all colors, so you can check if it’s applied.

SwappedRedAndGreen.icc (13.4 KB)
This profile swaps red and green channels and, if applied twice, the image looks unchanged.

After testing the blue one to check that the profiles are being applied, you can use the red/green to check if it’s applied once or twice.

9

Thank you very much!