A wider gamut shows more colors. Specifically, more saturated colors.
Compared to sRGB, aRGB can show deeper greens. DP3 shows deeper greens, and deeper reds. Blues are the same.
With a properly color managed system¹, sRGB content on a wide-gamut screen looks exactly the same as on an sRGB screen. The OS takes care to convert the colors appropriately (but e.g. the color picker in GIMP will show a different readout depending on the color space).
So you don’t need to swap anything. You can run darktable-DP3 on your aRGB screen and get most of the green benefits, just less of the red.
I hope that answered your question. I’m not entirely sure I understood it correctly.
Footnote 1: properly color managed currently means MacOS and this-year’s Wayland. Windows and X11 (IIRC) just splat sRGB into the wider gamut, making everything look oversaturated, unless an app specifically implements color management on its own.
Thx again for your effort, to explain things around DP 3 .
But I do not see any benefit to run it , besides my already running various DT builds .
The ones I do run … are either testing builds with various new modules to try out , or my main build .
But cool that you share your thoughts and ideas !!!
I took another look at this, and apparently, I needed to tell the build scripts explicitly to target an older version of macOS. With my up-to-date macOS, the oldest version I could target is 26, which should get it running for you.
Thanks very much Bastian for this work.
I wonder why this isn’t the standard distributed version. Working in srgb isn’t that great on modern hardware.
Darktable is a very powerful application and on my opinion on par or better than Lightroom and Capture One in many ways but this problem on Apple hardware has to be resolved to make it valuable for professional editing.
Coming from Capture One, I tried to use an upcoming cairo version for Darktable in 2023 to circumvent the sRGB restriction on MacOS by feeding image data directly in the display profile without further conversion by the OS (Color Management - Use newer cairo version for darktable 4.4 · Issue #14106 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub), but when this cairo change was later reverted I gave up and returned to Capture One. My main application is Fine Art Printing and for softproofing sRGB is quite limiting compared to most paper profiles.
Now I am excited to run your build on MacOS 26.6 for another attempt on Darktable. After setting the display profile to Display P3 RGB all seems to work well. With your planned CI integration I might even be able to stay up to date, great!
Quite the opposite. With their four/six/eight/ten/more inks, printers can cover quite a large gamut. (Although many of these inks seem to be used for smoothing gradients and color constancy in bad illumination, rather than gamut extension).
But their dynamic range is naturally rather smaller.
If my final target is screen/web (sRGB), would this change be a net negative because I’d need soft proofing all the time? In other words, is this change only for people that export to high gamut color spaces? Or is it also useful for editing, so for example you know that there is a very deep blue, even though it won’t export correctly?
This change gives darktable the option to display more saturated colors. It does not change anything unless you tell it explicitly to do so. The default remains sRGB, and if you don’t change it, this build behaves exactly like the sRGB build.
And, to be frank, the difference between sRGB and DP3 is not nearly as big as the artificial test pictures make it out to be. Even in deeply saturated sunsets, the difference is pretty subtle.