Wide Gamut Monitors, ...still somewhat scratching my head.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Good primer for those using wide gamut monitors, or at least it seems to make sense….

http://www.artstorm.net/journal/2009/07/color-management-wide-gamut-dell-2408/

 

We started using Dell wide gamut monitors a couple of years ago. Ever since then my color workflow has been screwy, with the main problem being related to hyper saturated. This article appears to have straightened things out for me. Up until this point I was working carefully and fighting a lot of headaches. I don’t know why I didn’t find this earlier.

 

You can see the problem in the attachment. All of the images are fairly close, except the Picasa image. The Picasa images represents what happens when you are not extra strict about which ICC profile you are using when, or what type of application you are viewing color managed images in.

 

But, if I view the image in Picasa on one of our non wide gamut monitors, the colors look fine.

 

EDIT:

I should also mention that the Image.jpg file viewed in Windows Photo Viewer, and Picasa are the exact same image. I didn't change anything with it, except open it in a different app.

Edited August 11, 2010 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Ok... Just posting that answered a few questions that I was still scratching my head about.

 

Neither Chrome nor Internet Explorer are color aware. So why don't all images look hyper saturated when I am looking at the gallery's? The answer is that they do, or rather they must?

 

I only say this because I viewed the image I just posted in Chrome, and it displayed the orange at about twice the intensity level that it was when I screen shot it out of a non color aware application. It hurts my eyes just looking at that orange.

 

But, both Firefox and Safari are color aware, or at least that is what I read on the interwebs. So I guess I will be switching back to Firefox soon.

[Jeff Mottle]

Ok... Just posting that answered a few questions that I was still scratching my head about.

 

Neither Chrome nor Internet Explorer are color aware. So why don't all images look hyper saturated when I am looking at the gallery's? The answer is that they do, or rather they must?

 

I only say this because I viewed the image I just posted in Chrome, and it displayed the orange at about twice the intensity level that it was when I screen shot it out of a non color aware application. It hurts my eyes just looking at that orange.

 

But, both Firefox and Safari are color aware, or at least that is what I read on the interwebs. So I guess I will be switching back to Firefox soon.

 

I wrote about a lot of this in the color management chapter I wrote for 3DATS books, but that article is pretty good and correctly relays the problem. I wrote about some strategies for dealing with it in the chapter and I think I might have posted it somewhere in the color management forum here too.

 

It really depends on the colors in the image as to how much a wide gamut display will affect the saturation of the colors. Some colors will not shift as noticeably as others when they are mapped to a different color space. Which is essentially what is happening with a wide gamut display and a non color managed application. I don't know if I interpreted your last post correctly?

 

Safari is color managed, but Firefox by default is not either. You can however download the "Color Management" Add-On which will allow it to use the display profile and read ICC profiles in images if they exist. You are correct that IE and Chrome are not.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Your article definitely goes into a great deal more detail of the process, and how to manage the workflow.

 

The key thing I wasn't understanding was the concept of why some image on the high gamut monitor were coming out super saturated. Which if I understand correctly is because pixels whose colors fall outside of the gamut ac ertain ICC profile can display are mapped to the max closest for that color when the application does not have color management built into it. Meaning a pixel that is a shade of red that can not be understood is forced to 255, 0, 0. Which causes the supersaturation.

 

I probably should have gleamed it from your writings, but I tend to be a skim reader, and then need hands on to put the concept into action.

 

I tend to work on a couple of different computer when doing post work. Different computer seem to perform differently when using Photoshop to do some actions. Which is part of a greater problem that has not been figured out yet. I was experiencing the majority of my hyper saturation problems when working between these two computers. Not the most efficient process to begin with.

 

Thanks for the tip on Firefox. I am going to grab the extension this morning.

 

Also, the link at the end of your chapter is broken. http://www.cgarchitect.com/color

[Jeff Mottle]

Hey Travis,

 

First off, thanks for mentioning that broken link. It actually wasn't broken, but someone exploited part of our forum and changed a file that cause the forum not to forward to the correct forum properly. It's all fixed and the link should work as expected now. I owe you one just for finding this as it could have been really bad if it had gone on much longer!

 

The reason the color becomes more saturated is because a different meaning is being assigned to the RGB pixel values. In my chapter I spoke about how RGB values are ambiguous and have no meaning until some sort of scale is assigned to them. That scale is assigned by assigning those values to a color space. Among other things you can equate a color space to units of measurements like meters, inches, centimeters. If I tell you just 7, that means nothing until I tell you the unit.

 

Outside of a color managed environment windows assumes that the unit to assign RGB values is the sRGB color space. Windows assumes this as they have yet to get with he 21st century and recognize that most displays no longer have a color space that approximates the sRGB color space. Most new displays more closely approximate the AdobeRGB color space.

 

To understand why a color is more saturated you just have to look at the size of both the sRGB and AdobeRGB color space to see how much bigger the AdobeRGB space is with certain colors.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]38628[/ATTACH]

 

A color space has to contain all of the colors from 0 0 0 to 255 255 255. As such if the size of the color space changes, so does the actual color in relation to how we see color (the horseshoe shaped plot - Chromaticity diagram). If you look at the top of the sRBG triangle (gamut plot) and then look at the top of the AdobeRGB gamut plot you can see how different the color would be for the same RGB value. That's why the colors are shifting. The image which looks good in an sRGB color space can look very saturated in AdobeRGB. Keep in mind that color spaces are three dimensional so the above plot is just one cross section at the 50% luminosity of the color space.

 

Does this make sense?

 

As for having photoshop display colors differently on different displays. Assuming they are not drastically different, old or somehow defective, as long as both displays are calibrated to the same specifications, there should be very little difference between then. If they are both calibrated, then it's likely how you are using ICC profiles and using color management in Photoshop.