U2413 - Factory Color Calibration and ICC profiles

Thank you for your great and detailed reply. I really appreciate it.
I sitll have some doubts...

If sRGB and aRGB are the calibrated monitor settings, then why should I need a calibrator?

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To summarize my understanding:
a) if I need to edit sRGB photos (for web) I should set Windows with sRGB.icm and put the monitor settings to sRGB
b) if I need to edit aRGB photos (for lab printing) I get better results if I set Windows with AdobeRGB1998.icm and the monitor to 50/50 and AdobeRGB color space

Please confirm the above points a and b.

If the two points above are true, then do you think it is reasonable (and has whatever sense) to keep windows with a color profile and then change the monitor profile in DPP? I am thinking whether there is a way to avoid always changing the windows profiles. Because I sometime need to edit sRGB and sometimes AdobeRGB photos and changing back and forth is not convenient. Any hints on this? Maybe the software settings automatically override the OS settings? [Practical example. I set Windows to sRGB. I need to edit/create Adobe RGB photos. Can I set DPP with a AdobeRGB monitor profile and then I set the monitor color space to AdobeRGB and get the right results, or the Windows sRGB will influence in the wrong way the way I see the photos? ]

P.s. I don't have any srgb.icm ... the most similar one is sRGB IEC61966-21 with a filename sRGB Color Space Profile.icm - is that the same?

Changed to AdobeRGB factory preset right now, 24% (which is the value I need for my  D50-120cd/m2  "Custom OSD mode" calibration), it's fine.
Prad.de also agrees:

Regarding to profiles:

an icm file just stores how th display behaves in a certain configuration, nothing more... but it can also store VCGT values for GPU calibration. Since you use standard profiles (or CAL1 CAL2 profiles if you hardware calibrate it) the icm do not store a calibration in VCGT (just output=input values to "clean" GPU LUT in CAL1/CAL2)
So no changes in your screen will happen if switching "non calibration" profiles, Windows Desktop is not color managed.
You would need to close and open again a color managed aplication (like DPP or Photoshop) to notice profiles changes at OS level.


A final note:

It is a nonsense to have a widegamut monitor without a measurement device and because it is a GBLED backlight device there are only 3 devices under $6000 that will measure it properly: i1DisplayPro, colormunki display and basiccolor discuss (and the last one is just a guess).
Better to work with an sRGB monitor and mess arround with its RGB gains "by sight".

This is how I set the windows profiles.

But no matter which one I set as default or whether I "combine my settings with system default" nothing changes in the monitor. I mean... no color difference. At all. Am I doing something wrong? Isn't it the right way to choose/change the windows color profile?

What about the 20-25 settings of brightness.... if I put like this it gets very very dark and it's pretty impossible to work... even to use google starts to be difficult.

50/50 in brigtness/contrast is too high... it's more than 250cd/m2. Unusable for most pepople (me included).
Also as monitor ages (let's say ~6months of use) white point, gamma and grey balance may (and will) shift. That's why RE-calibrations are needed.

Going to your questions:
a ) unusable but I have not seen how sRGB preset white point drifts as you lower brightness, I think it will shift towards blue.
b ) Unusable, BUT if you lower brightness to 20-25% (100-140cd/m2) it think that "visually" the white point will not drift too much so it's usable in 20-25% range with an AdobeRGB1998.icm profile.

Your next question only applies to b )
Since Canon DPP seems to be a color managed program (like Photoshop, GIMP or even Firefox if configured) you can edit sRGB photos while in AdobeRGB preset but only if an AdobeRGB-like profikle is active for the display. The program will deform RGB values from the image and map to your device RGB values, the transformations are done via calculations with the data provided from image profile (or "workspace profile" if none) and  from device profile (AdobeRGB.icm for your display... or the printer's icm file)
If you set manually the monitor profile in DPP it will do the same (as it does in GIMP), but I think that's easier to set Adobe icm at OS level and let all the programs (Photoshop, Lightroom, Corel, DPP, GIMP, Firefox, media player classic, Adobe Acrobat...) read it and USE it.
Unless gamming or using Internet Explorer/Chrome/Opera all your computer time could be in color managed apps....

The profiles:
sRGB IEC61966-21 => it's the one you were looking for.

For AdobeRGB like icm
http://www.argyllcms.com/
Download windows zip, inside "/ref" you will find "ClayRGB1998.icm" which it's the same but without "Adobe" (TM)

ooh I was shocked and started to think my monitor was faulty :)

25 brightness and 50 contrast looks very good :) Thanks much

I think I'll buy soon the i1DisplayPro.

Great, I've tried that and it works. When I re-open the applications the color profiles get applied. :emotion-1:

I am a bit concerned about the brightness/contrast settings. Working with photos I need to see what will be printed, or see what other people see if the images will be in internet.

With 20 brightness and 25 contrast is not good for my monitor. This is a way too different from print. For example a contrast of 0 makes the screen completely black.
Maybe in my screen the values are not in percentage, but is some other way?

Not sure... is there any way to select the right brightness/contrast? Any software or website that helps to do that?

NO! DO NOT CHANGE CONTRAST. I've said only to lower brightness to 20-25% to get a desired luminance near 120.
Please set 50% contrast again. Also changes in contrast will shift white point, if you raises contrast Green will be boosted.

The way I do it is to use the Dell Display Manager to automatically switch the monitor presets.

I put the default preset as sRGB, so all non-color managed applications including the Windows desktop display correctly with a standard gamut.

Then I add all color managed applications such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to the Dell Display Manager and make it switch the monitor to AdobeRGB mode when these applications run, so they can take advantage of the monitor's wide gamut. The icc profile in the Windows control panel should also be set to Adobe RGB (1998). Don't worry about changing the icc profile back to sRGB for non-color managed applications because they will ignore the color space in the profile anyway, and just assume sRGB standard gamut.

With this setup, color managed programs such as Canon DPP should automatically adapt the color space to correctly display both sRGB and AdobeRGB files on the monitor in wide gamut. The sRGB files will still be restricted to the sRGB color space though, so you will not be able to push the color saturation as far as in AdobeRGB. If you do have a file in AdobeRGB or a RAW camera file that has very saturated colors and wish to see how it looks in sRGB which is what most people use on the internet, etc, then you can use a soft-proofing function in Canon DPP if it has one, or just save to a sRGB file.

Hi ORB1060,

great suggestion. I have just set it as you suggested. Windows ICC AdobeRGB and the monitor will be sRGB for everything but the image editing sw which will turn automatically into AdobeRGB.

Internet browsing

This setup is great for internet browsing with Chrome, because it doesn't use the color profiles, so it will be always sRGB.
However what do you think is the best configuration for FireFox? If the images in internet have a color profile embedded, for example aRGB, FF will show it in aRGB and the monitor will be in sRGB - it's making me crazy :emotion-8:

Canon DPP

If I have everything configured as above (Windows with AdobeRGB and the monitor will change to AdobeRGB when entering DPP) it will be great to edit AdobeRGB images. And Canon DPP will then export JPG with an AdobeRGB profile. In this way I have images ready for print.

But... I need to have also a copy for web... and of course I want both people using FF and the people using Chrome to see the images as they really are (assuming their monitors are well calibrated and their Windows is set to sRGB).
So would it be the solution to import the aRGB .JPG photos to PS and then save for web and embed a sRGB profile? Will PS add the right saturation to sRGB so that it will look like the aRGB?
If not, then I don't understand what is the function "save for web" for. Because if PS doesn't create a sRGB like a aRGB, then it is the same as putting in the web a aRGB photo and watch it using a sRGB profile :/

Internet browsing

Go to this webpage: http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page2 and select the second image with the water bottles, then run your mouse over the cyan list of color spaces with embedded profiles.

If the browser is doing color management correctly, and you have a correctly set up wide gamut monitor, the colors do not drastically change in each color space, except the deeply saturated green water bottle, blue band of sky on it, and the blue water bottle will only show up in the wide gamut color spaces: AdobeRGB, ProPhoto and WideRGB. Also the red gets clipped a bit in the ColorMatch and AppleRGB color spaces.

However, each browser does color management differently.

Internet explorer converts everything to sRGB, so all the photos look the same even if you have a wide gamut monitor. The monitor should be set to the sRGB preset.

Chrome does actually support color management for photos, but not for text, so you will see the deeply saturated colors on a wide gamut monitor. So you could set the monitor to AdobeRGB and the photos will display correctly, but the text will be overly saturated.

I don't use Firefox but apparently it supports full color management for photos and text when you set the "gfx.color_management.mode" to 1. This website can be used to test text colors: http://www.computerhope.com/htmcolor.htm . The text colors should not be overly saturated on a wide gamut monitor. The monitor should be set to the AdobeRGB preset for Firefox.

Canon DPP

It all depends on whether your photos contain deeply saturated colors that are only available in the AdobeRGB color space and not in sRGB. Because when you "save for web" it will actually clip or compress these saturated colors down to the sRGB color space. When this happens, the photos do not look the same, such as the water bottle photo, so you should soft-proof to make sure you are happy with how the sRGB version looks.

You should not put an AdobeRGB file on the web for general viewing, because it is possible that the viewer's web browser does not adapt the color space correctly and all of the colors will display very dull. This will look like that water bottle photo if you go along the orange line which does not have embedded color profiles.

What you wrote is mostly nonsense...


IE do not have color management (at least with latest version for W7). IE does not read "OS monitor profile" so it is asuming that you have an sRGB device. If you are using a wide gamut OSD mode all colors will look oversaturated. It does not matter that IE can actually read and understand profile embeded in an image... without knowing monitor's profile it cannot remap gamut from the image to the actual monitor gamut.


Firefox reads "OS monitor profile" (on application startup as Photoshop does) and ALL images with embebed profiles are rendered properly. Open an sRGB image within widegamut OSD mode and an accurate profile for this mode and you will be seeing an sRGB image.
What "color_management=1" does is to asume that all untaged images (without profile) and all HTML colors (stated as RGB values like por example "#00FF00", green) are interpreted as sRGB. That means sRGB gamut an sRGB gamma.
An exception to this are profiles with CIECAT02 chromatic adaptation (like the ones that can be generated with DCCS 1.5+) which firefox does not  read properly. If using Dell Color Calibration Solution stay with Bradford chromatic adaptation (like ArgyllCMS).

Please take a look here.

The 1 image is the original AdobeRGB image edited in AdobeRGB settings and AdobeRGB monitor settings.
The 2 image is the same image, but saved for web with a sRGB profile embedded.

If I use the "save for web", I expect PS to save the same image I see in AdobeRGB settings in a way that also people using monitors and settings in sRGB will see it the same or very similar way I see it in AdobeRGB.

But as you can see both images look the same in Chrome, FF. But in IE11 I see both files with the right saturation.

The strange thing is that while I am saving for web, I can see that the preview has the colors more saturated than the image I am seeing open in PS. Thus I understand that the image that PS is trying to save with a sRGB profile will have more saturated colors in order to 'copy' as much as possible the AdobeRGB gamut. But after, when I see the saved images using Windows Photo Viewer they both look identical.

Why PS in the preview "save for web" shows the image with higher saturation, but then it saves it with the same saturation?
Why both images look the same in the browser? None of them has the saturation I worked on.

P.s I use photoshop with monitor settings AdobeRGB and the browsers with monitor settings sRGB (the monitor is switching automatically.) Of course the monitor makes a higher saturation in aRGB, but I expect PS to save for web an image with higher saturation so that when I switch the monitor back to sRGB it will look as if it was in aRGB with the aRGB profile embedded.

Am I doing anything wrong?

EDIT: the message in Italics above is not actual anymore. My mistake. Everything is working as I wanted. I just had to restart the browsers.

I can see that if I edit images in aRGB and want people to see it the same way in the web, I have to save them for web in sRGB. I was seeying them with a wrong saturation because I still had the system/windows using aRGB. As soon as I changed the windows color management to sRGB and restarted the browser and set the monitor to sRGB the images look the same as the ones in aRGB. So it will be fine in the web.

The only pain is that I always have to change the Windows color management to sRGB if I want to see the real colors in the browsers :(

@yumichan Why is what I wrote nonsense? I don't see anything that conflicts with what you wrote.

@seekman

Something is still not right. I can see all of your photos in several different browsers with the correct saturation. In my Windows Color Management control panel, my monitor icc profile is set to Adobe RGB (1998) and I do not have to change it between browsers. I use Dell Display Manager to switch my monitor to these color space presets:

Internet Explorer 11: sRGB

Chrome and Firefox with gfx.color_management.mode=1: AdobeRGB

I'm not sure what's happening in the Photoshop Save for Web screenshot. What are the other options in the "Preview: Monitor Color" drop down box?

@orb1060

A ) IE is not color managed, at least in al IEs avaliable to Winows7 SP1. If a program is not aware of any device profiles (not image profiles) it is not color managed because it does not know hot to render properly a specific color coordinate.

B ) Yo do not need to enable full color management in firefox to render photos properly. If an image has a profile embeded (it is aware of its colorspace) firefox renders it properly against monitor's profile (if that profile is inderstood, some problems with DCCS table based CIECAT02 profiles).  It works out of the box.
An image  that has no profile (it's unaware of its colorspece) or a HTML RGB color value (like "#00ff00") are rendered as if they have the same profile as the device profile. The same as photoshop with is "workspace profile". But if you want, choosing the option that you stated you can tell Firefox that it has to asume that "working colorspace" is sRGB.

It's very very different from your post.

Tl;DR:
-IE is not color managed in W7 or previous windows versions by any means
-Firefox works out of the box for tagged images.