Quote:
Originally Posted by RickS
Even high end monitors designed for colour critical work need calibration. The Dell monitor probably has defaults that make it look "good" i.e. bright and flashy.
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Yep, that's exactly what Dell has done with many of their large panel LCDs. They made the mistake of shipping their 3008WFPs in wide gamut mode by default with no pre-calibrated sRGB profile. Those poor support guys!
Quote:
Originally Posted by RickS
With no colour management the RGB values are just sent directly to the screen to interpret as it sees fit. Say you have an 8-bit colour which is completely green <0,255,0>. On a screen set to sRGB gamut this will give you the maximum green. On a screen set to AdobeRGB gamut it will be the maximum green in that wider gamut, i.e. more saturated.
So, what you are seeing is what I'd expect...
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I think that's exactly it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by philiphart
I can understand that change if I was looking at an Adobe RGB file in Photoshop, where the monitor in sRGB mode couldn't display the gamut but it could in Adobe RGB mode.
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Phil, colour management on desktop computers is (unnecessarily) confusing. The colours that you see looking at an image in Photoshop goes through a chain of three layers of processing:
1. Your monitor's settings, e.g. native or pre-loaded calibration curves (such as the sRGB and Adobe RGB setting you were looking at).
2. The operating system's colour profile for your monitor. This creates a mapping between the RGB numbers and the physical colour that your monitor actually displays.
3. The soft proofing profile being applied by Photoshop. This is used to simulate one device on another, e.g. using your monitor to simulate what a print (with reduced gamut) might look like.
It's generally best to turn off #3 (i.e. disable soft proofing in Photoshop) at the start so it's less confusing.
When you changed the colour space setting on the monitor to say Adobe RGB, that changes #1. However, the operating system still thinks you're in sRGB mode so it's sending RGB data in sRGB format to the monitor... hence why you get the colour shift. When you change your monitor setting to Adobe RGB, at the same time you also need to go into the colour management settings (I *think* it's under Control Panel -> Displays in Windows... I don't recall off the top of my head) and change the colour profile for the monitor to Adobe RGB.
Once you've adjusted #1 and #2 simultaneously, you shouldn't get a colour shift - but in some images you might be able to notice slightly richer saturation.
If you colour calibrate a monitor, you basically set the monitor to its "best" custom setting (#1), and the calibration device physically measures the colours and creates a new colour profile for the operating system to use (#2). This way, you can maximise the capabilities of what the monitor can display.
tl;dr when you change your monitor to Adobe RGB mode, you also have to change Windows/OS X to Adobe RGB mode for that monitor