Oh dear!, this does not appear, through my distorted-reality perception field, to be going well, does it? ‘This’ being my original request for clarification of just a few of the many aspects of the term ‘color management’ as it is practised within dt. It’s probably a user error (in my case it almost always is), so perhaps I should try re-phrasing the question.
This latest (as I type) response - from a contributor whose inputs are of particular importance and value to me - illustrates my difficulty and is a further illustration of the impenetrability I find is a general characteristic of things associated with dt. Based on the information in this response I went searching for this config folder; that was about 2 hours ago. A relevant selection from the results of a Windows search for “config” are (apologies: I haven’t been able to master the search facility to restrict Windows to search on a single word only):
None of the 15 folders named “config”, found on local disk C, have anything to do with darktable. A similar search on disks D to K on my system also failed to find a relevant dt-related folder called config. Not to be deterred, I searched for a file or folder whose name included the string “…color…profile…”. The total search results are:
I decided that there probably wasn’t any point in searching the other disks.
So what is wrong with me, that yet again I fail to be able to get beyond even the first step in freely given and greatly appreciated advice? Or, to put it another way, how should I rephrase that part of my original question, the response to which is given here, so that I get an answer that is ‘executable’ by me? Ori should I just be taking the hint that I should revert to age and type, forget about the idea of taking snaps in raw format and processing them, sit back in a Pythonesque (as in Monty) comfy chair, turn the TV to some left-pondian soap channel and just drift inexorably to a dribbling and incontinent oblivion?
Well, no. Round objects and coitus-off to that. Time to return to the User Manual, where I read:
“For darktable to faithfully render colors on screen it needs to find the correct display profile for your monitor. In general this requires your monitor to be properly calibrated and profiled, and it needs the profile to be correctly installed on your system”
Good, that was my understanding; I had no problem downloading an .icm for my monitor from the manufacturer’s web-site, nor in installing it (been doing that since color management first arrived in Windows), but just to check, I read:
“To investigate your display profile configuration you can run the darktable-cmstest binary (Linux only) which prints out useful information (e.g. profile name per-monitor) and tells you if the system is correctly configured.”
So, what about Windows? I just have to assume I have installed the .icm correctly. Then I read:
“Bear in mind that high-tier consumer-grade screens usually don’t need a user-made display profile unless you need to perform soft-proofing with professional expectations, since they are properly calibrated to sRGB in the factory.”
Is it because I am definitely and firmly in the cohort which can be categorised as “obviously of ‘not Mensa-class’ material” that I conclude from this extract from the user guide that, despite the opening quote, a profile for my monitor is not really required after all, and I can just get by with my monitor hardware set to a color mode and select the same mode in the menu presented by the gamut toggle, or the softproof toggle in the darkroom?
But hey, that’s where I came in, isn’t it?