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color-profilegamut
Graham Perks
Graham Perks

Reputation: 23390

How do wide gamut color images look on a regular display?

Webkit has a page with examples of wide-gamut images at https://webkit.org/blog-files/color-gamut/.

If you visit this page on a regular display driven by a color-managed OS' (iOS 9.3+, macOS), many of the images look different between sRGB and the alternate gamut image.

Why do they differ? To my eyes, they differ in the same way on a wide-gamut display (iMac 27" retina, iPad Pro) - the oranges and reds are boosted. So it seems having a wide-gamut display isn't adding much.

I would have guessed the wide-gamut images would be color-sync'd "down" to be indistinguishable from the sRGB version. So why is a difference very apparent?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 403

Answers (1)

Mark
Mark

Reputation: 92440

In a color-managed workflow the input source profile will be converted to the display profile to display images regardless of whether the input is sRGB or something wider like AdobeRGB. If the input space is smaller than the display space then there should not be any change in the perceived color. If the input space is larger, then the conversion will use some sort of rendering intent to try to map (or clip) the gamut of the input space to the screen space.

The reason the sRGB images look different than the wider profile images is because the gamut of your monitor is different than sRGB. Regular gamut monitors are not sRGB monitors - they might be similar, but there are not the same. If you are using a relatively new monitor, theres a good chance that it's gamut will extend beyond sRGB in certain areas. So when you convert from a wide space to your screen's space you'll likely see colors that are still out of the sRGB gamut, but within your display's

Upvotes: 2

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