Which profile is darktable using on a Windows10 multi-monitor PC?

Software darktable
1

Hi, newbie user here - please be gentle! :smiley:

I have searched the forum, but I can only find snippets of info about darktable display profiles but not the whole story. I have a Windows10 laptop and an external screen. I have profiled both screens and got them looking almost identical. My question is, if I start darktable on the laptop screen and move the Window to the external monitor, which profile is it then using? I don’t see an obvious change. Can I force darktable to re-read the display profile? Or do I even need to? :thinking:

2

darktable 2.6 was able to use the display profile of monitor it was started on.
There is however regression in 3.0 and later, it seems using only first monitor profile.

3

Do you have the two monitor profiles set for each screen? If yes, then you shouldn’t see any difference.

Darktable comes with darktable-cmstest which will give you information about the color management of your system.

4

Possible workarounds for above bug

  • right click softproofing icon and choose the profile manually
  • set second monitor as primary and after darktable starts set it back
    (this works on my w8.1)
5

darktable-cmstest is not part of the release for the Windows edition.

6

Thanks for that @danny. I’m still very new to darktable and not familiar with the softproofing icon (which I have now just read up on). What I thought you meant was the ‘set display profile’ feature, which is the little monitor icon bottom-right of the image thumbnails in lightroom. When I click this and hover over the ‘display profile’ setting there is a clue as to where you can add your own profiles. In my case I’ve put the profile I created with my calibration software into

C:\Users\Walter\AppData\Local\darktable\color\out

So now that profile appears in the dropdown list and I can set it for the ‘display profile’ and ‘preview display profile’. The settings are permanent and survive restarting darktable.

I think given the uncertainty about which profile dt is loading, this solution is probably easiest to live with until such time as the bug is resolved.

edit I now realise that what I have done is exactly what you were suggesting, but coming at it from lighttable as opposed to the darkroom softproofing icon. Every day is an education!

7

I’m glad you found a way.

Btw if you work with non-raw files be aware that there is another color issue in stable 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 (this is already fixed in master):
https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/issues/4651
Workaround is to set in ‘input color profile’ module embedded profile manually.

8

On mac the little soft proof note says ICC profiles in …/.config/darktable/color/out
However there were no ‘color’ or ‘out’ folders, so I created them, then copied and pasted the calibrated profile into ‘out’. Was that the correct process?

9

Thanks @danny, good to know although I do work in RAW almost without exception.

10

@Soupy I’m not a mac user, but on Windows 10 I also had to create those last two folders like you. It sounds to me like you’ve done the right thing. Does your calibrated profile now appear in the dropdown list? If so, I’d say it was working.

11

@WaltWright Ah yes it does. Great! Thanks.