What to choose for "Color Mode" on my BenQ monitor ?

Software darktable
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Having been counselled elsewhere in this forum to get the ‘profiles’ set consistently in my dt installations, I’m starting with hardware: my BenQ 2700PT monitor on my Windows install. I have installed a .icm file for this monitor, downloaded from BenQ and now wish to set the most appropriate “Color Mode” for the monitor. I am presented with choices: standard, Adobe RGB, sRGB, B&W, Rec709, DCi-P3 and Photo. I rule out standard as that is for non-photographic work. I think I can rule out Photo as that appears to for ‘viewing still images’ - but not for the best colour representation. I can obviously rule out B&W, leaving me to choose between Adobe RBG, sRGB, Rec709 and DCi-P3. Interestingly Rec2020 is not an option.

Is there a distinct recommendation of which to choose - and why?

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Depends on the icm you installed . That icm (calibration profile ) is made with a certain setting . It must be explained where you get it from , for which display mode it is.

This could very well be ‘standard’ (and then the icm will tell software what the screen is capable of ), but as I said, this is for the docs of your monitor and the download section you got the icm from.

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If you mostly render to sRGB, then that’s probably a reasonable standard. If you render video or video games intended for modern television screens, DCP3 is probably more appropriate. If you print a lot, use the biggest gamut you can get.

Since most applications are not color managed and implicitly expect an sRGB target, I think sRGB makes the most sense in most situations. This might change as UHD (and with it, DCP3) becomes more of a standard.

(Unless display managers actually convert sRGB content to larger display gamuts? AFAIK most window managers don’t, but I could be wrong on that)

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There is a YT channel sponsored in part by Benq… ArtisRight… He has covered all manner of calibration methods…he might be a good resource if it is not clear what your monitor does when you select one of those modes

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You should calibrate/profile your screen with the BenQ calibration software and there probably choose “panel native”.

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@LateJunction You may want to move this thread to the hardware category since it has nothing to do with dt. I would help you with that but because I have been busy it looks like the forum has removed my Regular privileges.

Colour management is a tough topic to navigate. Even if you grasp it a little bit, it takes effort to learn and do properly, and depends on your system configuration. You can get ensnared into miscommunication among the software and hardware components; e.g. a graphics card could unnecessarily confuse the OS/CMS when using LUTs.

To help you think through your specific question from a perspective not yet presented, I would say you should go with the default settings. Or better yet, go with those that represent your monitor’s native settings; i.e. what it is best at showing physically.

All monitors have a degree of wiggle room for a variety of reasons. The ones that do not matter to the user are settings that make them look good in a showroom for demo and sale purposes. Related is manufacturers putting yet another checkbox in their feature list. This is all garbage. A good reason for there to be buttons and “hardware calibration” software is that no monitor is made perfectly. It may be calibrated to standards and pass quality control in the factory but still be off, according to their or your standards. It could be a dud or good enough. Not all of us can tell anyway, let alone have the tools to evaluate the individual device in question. Yes, there is variance between individual devices too.

What you need to determine is what are your monitor’s true default/native specs. How much of Adobe RGB, sRGB, Rec709 or DCI-P3 colours can it actually display? At what brightness? With what ambient light? Sometimes, the so-called “hardware calibration”, “colour profiles” and other tweaks help bring that out, or help bring them back. But to me, hardware calibration in the formal sense is the physical specs the manufacturer decides it should have and how close it is to that standard. Everything else is superfluous.

What you really need to do is set the screen as best you can to embody the colours you want. As noted above, knowing what your display can actually do factors into this. Next, you should make your own monitor profile. One should make a profile for every hardware device, including the camera and printer. I stay away from the term calibration because with a profile what you are doing is actually characterizing the properties of the device in question.

A profile will tell the OS/CMS/app: “Listen, this device is not actually good at showing some of the purples. Maybe you could do something about that.” This kind of answers your question on the other thread why each part of the system should have a profile. This is so that each app can communicate with the other what it is trying to do with the colour data. Otherwise, the data is just discrete or float values. Profiles are part of the CMS that gives context to what these numbers mean and what to do with them.

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I appreciate your advice: I would not want this thread to be cluttering up an inappropriate category. But… (ah, the inevitable ‘but’) it was not my intent to make this a ‘hardware only’ discussion - indeed I thought I had focused on the choice of, and settings of, the many and varied color-related profiles within dt. Clearly I have not expressed this effectively enough to meet this objective, so allow me to add what I hope is an amendment which is not open to interpretation:

The methods for setting the choice of ‘color mode’ for my monitor is easy, for me, to understand from the user manual for the monitor. What is difficult is to understand which choice I should make to best suit the requirements for accurate color representation within dt. That is the part I do not understand and was the motivation behind my post.

Yes, there are two elements to the answer: a very easily stated hardware one ("choose option ‘x’') and, for me, a currently insurmountable one: set the following ‘n’ profiles in dt to the following ‘p’ settings, chosen out of ‘q’ options.

Does this allow you to modify your advice ?

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It won’t. What I would say is that based on a quick web search, your monitor appears to be 100% sRGB, 99% Adobe RGB and 95% DCI-P3. The latter is not even mentioned on the BenQ website, at least what I could glean. My conclusion is the hardware colour gamut is wide and shaped enough to encapsulate so many colours to have such good percentages. On the other hand NTSC is below 50%; I forget the number. I also learned that it uses a hardware 3D LUT to transform among colour modes.

If you want fully real colours, stick with sRGB. Remember what I said about brightness, surrounding light and system configuration. I will also add that the corners of the monitor will likely suffer from dimming, so colour there would be less accurate. Etc. If you want almost real, then go with Adobe RGB. A review site author said that it is the reddest reds that suffer from saturation in Adobe RGB mode when compared to a more capable monitor. That same author said a certain third-party tool was better than the manufacturer one and the findings were based on that.

Takeaways: do the research, try new things and report back us. :wink:

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