Continuing the [URL="http://dpnow.com/forum2/blog.php?b=78"]saga[/URL] of my problem viewing photos with weird colour in non colour-managed Web browsers, some research has revealed that this problem is almost certainly down to my monitor.

I don't seen nearly such a poor result on my laptop, nor the LCD screen on the kids' PC at home. All have calibrated screens, but the key difference seems to be that my monitor at the office has a much wider colour gamut than the others. It's substantially wider than sRGB and is pretty close to Adobe RGB in breadth.

[IMG]http://dpnow.com/files/forum/sRGB_space.png[/IMG]

Above is a three dimensional plot of the sRGB colour space.

[IMG]http://dpnow.com/files/forum/adi_monitor.png[/IMG]

Now, above, you see the colour gamut of my old ADI monitor which is used on my children's PC. The grey areas show that the ADI monitor gamut (shaded in greay) only exceeds sRGB very slightly in a few areas, but most of its space is within that of sRGB space.

[IMG]http://dpnow.com/files/forum/dgm_monitor.png[/IMG]

Here is sRGB super-imposed with the colour gamut space of my office monitor, a 24 inch [SIZE=2][COLOR=Black]DGM Digimate L2442WD. Now, the monitor space (grey) envelops sRGB space, its volume considerably greater.

Put as simply as possible, programs that display colour images without colour management (i.e. disregarding colour profiles and known colour spaces, like sRGB and Adobe RGB) display colour 'un-tagged'. The colour still has its space, but there is no way to determine accurately how one colour matches in the image to the colour displayed by the monitor. The colour space of the Web is similar to sRGB in size, but it is un-tagged.

Put as simply as I can, the old ADI monitor's colour gamut space fits fairly neatly inside sRGB space. There is less scope for un-tagged space to be mis-matched with monitor gamut space. On this monitor I only see a small, subtle difference in colour when viewing an sRGB image in Internet Explorer (no colour management) compared to FireFox (colour management enabled).

But with the DGM Digimate monitor, un-tagged Space rattles around inside the gamut space that this monitor affords. This means the scope for image colour to displayed colour mis-match is much higher and, surprise, I see a big difference in col;our between viewing the same sRGB image in IE and FireFox on this monitor.

[B]Does this mean a wide gamut monitor is bad?

[/B]Absolutely not. If your monitor is correctly calibrated, and you are viewing images in a colour managed environment (like FireFox with colour management enabled, or Photoshop, etc.) that respects industry standard (icc and icm) colour profiles, you will see better colour than with a narrow gamut monitor. It also means you will be able to see the superior colour tone of images in wider colour spaces than sRGB, like Adobe RGB.

The main downside of a wide gamut monitor is that colour will almost certainly look bad when viewed in an environment that is not colour managed, like Internet Explorer, for example.

There is a solution for users of wide gamut monitors, it's called soft-proofing, and I will be exploring this in a future blog update soon.




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