Blender on calibrated displays

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1

Hello.

Can it be that Blender doesn’t respect display calibration? All my screens are calibrated and images (both in the Image Editor as well as the rendered results) have a significant color shift compared to the same images in Photoshop (which is properly color managed). Blender is set to sRGB and no Look is activated of course.

Maybe somebody could clarify this and maybe suggest a way to get this to work properly.

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If your question can be rephrased to “does Blender bypass the .icc I am using on my operating system” then the answer is “yes”. It is an industry standard to do so for DCC apps, Nuke and Resolve basically do the same. They however allow you to load a LUT and use it in the viewports. Blender does support LUTs, but has no UI for loading them. The ocio.config file has to be edited manually.

Color Space guru Troy Sobotka has put together a thorough answer on BSE on how to generate a calibration file that can be used by Blender. It is a complex task at first, but it gets the job done.

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Thanks for the answer and confirmation. That description by Troy is very interesting technically but for a practical use too time-consuming to do. Besides that I have three screens and I don’t know how that would work automatically whenever I move a window from one screen to another. And even if so, I would have to two the editing thrice and every time I calibrate the screens or update Blender. It’s faster when i revert my calibration in Photoshop after opening the images.

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If you’re on Windows, everything uses the ICC profile for your primary display anyway. Drag a window from one display to another and see for yourself. If you then have a Mac handy, try it again there and notice the window “flashes” to a different color space once it’s on the other display. That’s how it’s SUPPOSED to work, but doesn’t because Windows’ color management is a mess.

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I works fine, but only if the program supports it. So I have no issues with it in Photoshop for example. But if Blender doesn’t support ICC profiles from display calibrations, than it doesn’t matter anyway.