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> When I say (255, 0, 0), I expect the display to show me its best approximation of red.

Which red? There isn't a single, true "red". And different materials produce different reds (my work's Sony BVM-X300's reddest red is going to look way different than your monitor's red). Not all displays use only RGB color primaries, too. For example, at Dolby's office in San Francisco they have a projector in their theater that uses 5 (IIRC) color primaries, not 3. 6-primary projectors exist. And other non-RGB displays.

> When I say (255, 255, 255), I expect the display to show me something as close to white as possible

Which white? D50? D55? D60? D65? D67? Something else? And yes, these different white points (and many others) are actually used in practice.

> (and at the brightest possible setting).

100 nits looks way, way different than 4,000 nits. Some monitors can do 10,000 nits.

> When I say (0, 0, 0), I expect the display to show me something that looks as close to black as possible. It's up to the display technology to decide whether this means just turn off that pixel on the screen or disengage the backlight or do whatever, but at the end of the day it's just trying to approximate black.

Which black? This might sound dumb, because we can agree that there is an objective "absolute black" (i.e. zero photons). But when an artist creates an image, the monitor they use has some version of black. If you don't account for that, the image may be distorted. Blacks can be crushed, for example.

An absolute color space exists. It's called XYZ. We could use it. Some image formats support it.

> An absolute color space exists. It's called XYZ. We could use it. Some image formats support it.

XYZ is really annoying to work in though. ACES is a pragmatic solution here, quite literally: https://blog.frame.io/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ACES-APO.jp...

Okay, fair enough two out of three primaries are imaginary colors, but nobody said you have to use the whole color space when your processing pipeline is meant to be using 32 bit floats. Delivery formats might want to be using a more real color space.

ACES (AP0) is an archive format for when you want to be absolutely sure you’re not clipping any colours. As a working space it’s terrible and AP1 should be preferred, either as ACEScg or ACEScc

AP1 is almost the same as rec.2020? I'm not sure what you mean by 'working space' but if preserving all colors was a primary or even secondary goal I definitely wouldn't cut myself down that far.

AP1 is essentially Rec.2020, yes.

By working space I mean a space in which a user manipulates the data in some way, e.g. image editing, grading, compositing or rendering.

And the red in my left eye isn't the same as the red in my right eye. Yes, when the lighting conditions are just right, I see different hues out of each eye [1]. I have to wonder how one would (or should?) correct for that in an image file format.

[1] I think from a stupid thing I did as a kid.

I think the best we can do with file-level metadata is account for only objective metrics. Subjective differences are best handled outside of the file metadata. The user can tune their display settings to match their preferences. This allows for correcting for physiological differences and stylistic preferences. If all files had correct metadata (for objective metrics), it would be a lot easier for an end user to tune the system to their liking because their end results would be consistent with their preferences.

took me a while to notice that I perceive color and light intensity differently in my two eyes. I think this is actually pretty natural (IE, it happens commonly?). Either way, I can also see polarization (haidinger's brush) which confused me a bunch when I was trying to explain what I saw and everybody else thought I was crazy).

You're assigning a color profile to the image in your model - the color profile of the display. Hence no color conversion needed, as source and target match.

What "red" and "green" are has changed quite dramatically with different display technologies. A display designed to meet Rec.2020 can show colors that other displays literally cannot produce and the deviation between the primaries is so big that everything looks like garbage if you don't do a color space conversion. Take some sRGB content and display it on a DCI P3 display. Looks like shit. Humans look like crabs.

> On monitors and displays, sure, those vary, but why allow people to specify a color profile on an image

The sole reason why we have device profiles defining device color spaces is so that we can convert from the image's color space to the device's color space. If images don't have a profile assigned to them, you don't need a device profile.

So you either have both image and device profile, or neither. Just one doesn't make sense.

But if you were forced to always use the same color profile on images? Why allow more than one? Wouldn't that vastly simplify the problem, as then you just have to worry about the device profile, instead of worrying about variation on both ends?

I get what you mean, but... the color profile of the image is the profile of the display where the image can be displayed without adjustment. Think of it as the display profile of the guy that sent you the image. The magic math transforms the image to your display profile. That means it will look exactly the same on both displays. If they both have a correct display profile.

If your green is going pink, then either your profiles are wrong, or your software is broken. Maybe it really is pink, and it just looks green for you, because you're ignoring color profiles.

But the fact is, most software is broken, and you should store images with the sRGB profile.

And also, you can actually calibrate consumer hardware, so that you can scan a photo, and reprint it. And the scan, display, and print will look exactly the same. (It's not the case by default, because consumer printers do what you do, stretch or fit the color space to the printer's. The Vivid and Natural profiles in the driver, respectively. This is a good default for documents, not for professional photography.)

>That means it will look exactly the same on both displays. If they both have a correct display profile

We can continue believing that Santa exists, or we can accept that effectively nobody has correct color profiles, and doesn't care either.

It's nice metadata you have there, would be a shame if I applied night mode to it at 6PM.

> also, you can actually calibrate consumer hardware

...with professional hardware that costs more than the one you have at hand.

Again, pretty much everyone will just tweak their monitor/printer settings until they get results that look OK.

>display and print will look exactly the same

Until you turn off the lights. Or until you turn on the lights (what color temperature is you light?). Or until the wind blows, moving that cloud over the sun, changing light temperature.

Or — wait for it — actually, that's all, while you've been waiting the sun has set.

The point being, all we can shoot for is FF0000 being what would be "red" for most, 00FF00 being "green", and 0000FF being "blue" — and then accept the "fade" of the digital image from one screen to another as a fact of life.

So, learn how to stop worrying and love unspecified RGB colorpsaces. Magenta only exists in your brain anyway [1]

Side note: did you ever think about how your recorded music isn't adjusted for the frequency response of the loudspeakers, and half the people will listen to it with the "BASS MEGABOOST" feature on anyway?

That's why the art of mastering exists. It's accepting the reality, and putting work into making it work with uncalibrated, crappy hardware — as well as hi-fi gear.

PS: have fun calibrating your vision to make sure that you don't see green where I see red

[1]https://medium.com/swlh/magenta-the-color-that-doesnt-exist-...

You can get pretty close without expensive calibration gear, using consumer gear that has a reasonable factory sRGB calibration.

https://blog.kaetemi.be/2021/02/01/calibrating-an-inkjet-pri...

As you mention, our brain adapts pretty easily to varying lighting conditions in the real world, and that could also work on a screen[1], but the ambiant context is what matters: if you look at an image “A” in your said “undefined color space” after having spent quite some times looking at sRGB images for a while, then your image “A” would look absolutely horrible until your brain starts to adapt, like when you put sunglasses on or off for instance. The big difference being: with sunglasses, we have no choice but wait for our brain to adapt, but on a computer all the user would do is close the image.

[1]: even though for some reason I don't know, it works much less well: if you try and take pictures with the wrong white balance setting, the picture will look like shit no matter how long you look at it.

As a side note,

> [1]https://medium.com/swlh/magenta-the-color-that-doesnt-exist-...

This article is pretty terrible, as her author mixes everything up.

Right, so sRGB should really just be the only allowed profile for images. That's my whole argument. There should be some standard profile all images should use, and then displays should deal with the work of converting things to a suitable display profile. Allowing more than one image-level profile just makes things way more complex for no perceivable benefit.

The sRGB color #ffffff should never mean "the brightest white on this monitor", unless you're using an average CRT.

Just imagine you're using an HDR display, where the brightest white is as bright as the sun.

OK but then when will you use that "bright as sun" color? If not, why provide them? If so, what color will you use ?

sRGB is quite literally defined as "the average 90s CRT in an office environment", i.e. full-white sRGB on a HDR display should be around 100 nits or so in those reference conditions (i.e. display set to "reasonable" brightness).

VR displays. Probably the color of the sun in linear RGB color space for rendering purpose, then converted to the display color space.

The color you will use isn't in SRGB, but is in other color spaces such as Rec2020.

Do you have a recent iPhone? Try taking a picture with the sun in it: the white of it will appear white as well, but the phone will display it considerably brighter than the white UI surrounding it.

Thankfully, "as bright as the sun" is waaaaaaay outside of what a monitor is capable of : SDR is (supposed to) top out at 10^2 cd/m^2, HDR10 at 10^3, Dolby Vision maxes out at 10^4 cd/m^2, but the midday sun is... ~10^9 !

> This is complicated enough, why do I need an image that will look good on only one kind of display and will have it's greens look pink on other displays.

That is precisely what attaching a profile to the image is supposed to avoid. It indicates what (255, 0, 0) in that image actually means. Then you convert that to the display profile to get the triplet that you must send to the display to actually get something that looks like it.

> Isn't having a color profile for the display enough?

What would you do with just one profile?

> The analogue in photography is photographs lose color clarity and fade as they age. Why should I care if this is the case in images as display technology evolves when this is already a problem with every physical medium?

Because with digital data we can do better?