Color Management question - AdobeRGB

carrottoptw

Hey, just wondering what is the best colour management if I want others to view my renders on different/other peoples  screens etc. My cinteq is set by default to Adobe RGB colour management and I'm painting textures in substance p.  Everything looks fine in SP and once I save a render from iray and take it to photoshop the colours and contrast look great.  However once I save that image as a tiff/jpeg etc to send to others/view on a different computer, the colours look a bit washed out/desaturated and not as "nice and contrasty" lol.  

Just wondering if thats because I'm texturing things looking through a monitor thats set to AdobeRGB and when I send to another computer its using srgb? Wanted to know whats usually the known thing to work in... sRGB if others are to see the work? 

Daf57

Hi,

Several similar questions answers on here, try a search for color profiles. Here's a recent that has some helpful replies.

https://polycount.com/discussion/207836/color-profiles

Daf

gnoop

carrottoptw said:

My cinteq is set by default to Adobe RGB colour management

Do you mean  rather output color space   set in monitor menu?

 A safe bet would be just setting you monitor to sRGB emulation mode in the monitor menu.    

If you still want to see "wider"  AdobeRGB colors you really need a colorimeter and an exact profile of your monitor to  see true accurate colors and not over-saturated ones  since "wider" gamut means basically more acid /vivid  base colors  and needs Photoshop color engine to compensate all colors across the whole range  for accurate representation.    In 3d soft you would never see them accurate probably.   Not until such a soft would have its own color engine. I have no idea if Substances have one, probably not.

If you haven't calibrated your monitor (did an exact  profile of your monitor) it could be showing anything , could have wrong gamma( perceptive visual contrast) and make you see over saturated Adobe RGB colors instead of true ones   if you system still assumes your monitor is "standard"  sRGB  and  uses some generic sRGB monitor profile instead of exact one. It  happens often since Windows knows nothing about what you set in monitor menu. 

 3d soft doesn't adjust colors on your screen for certain output color space.  Usually don't do anything beyond simple gamma correction. 

  Photoshop does full scale on screen color compensation  for your exact monitor comparing image profile and your exact monitor profile with its so called "color engine" 

 

  For doing this right Photoshop needs two things:  an exact  specific profile of your monitor and one of general standard profiles recorded with your image, like AdobeRGB one,  telling Photoshop in what color space image is recorded. They are two completely different things. One is a full exact characterization of your monitor and other just a space name  recorded with an image.

      

  3d soft doesn't write generic color profiles(space name) into output images usually.      So opening such image in Photoshop makes it considering it as a standard  sRGB one (by default Photoshop settings)  or it could ask you what's the image gamma .

Switching your monitor from "standard" sRGB to wider Adobe RGB mode you have to check the whole system to be sure it works correctly and uses appropriate profiles where applicable.  Colorimeters usually set all this  automatically  and add a special profile loader/checker to your system.

 

ps. Even with sRGB mode it's still better to calibrate for exact monitor profile  since the whole problem could be not the color management but rather a simple wrong output gamma and color temperature.  I saw pretty strong deviations from what monitor menu might tell you

gnoop

Making it more simple  with AdobeRGB wide gamut mode  you would see 100% accurate colors only in so called "color aware" applications like Photoshop, Firefox etc  and never in 3d soft.  Pictures would always be a bit more flashy there than they should be.

But first thing you have to do is to buy colormunki dysplay and calibrate the thing anyway. Your problem might be not the  gamut or color management in general at all

Or at least make sure Windows knows about the fact your display is  AdobeRGB  and uses appropriate monitor profile, maybe not exact one from the colorimeter  but at least  not generic sRGB one.