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How can one setup a proper color managed workflow if one uses a Hardware Calibrated Wide Gamut Display? I use my Calibrated Monitor with Photoshop and other photography applications without hassle.

I have read the OCIO website and now understand a bit how OCIO works. I have read through the Usage and Authoring sections, but still the part about display profiles is a complete mystery. There is no information about how to convert an ICC profile to a proper OCIO LUT format and how to setup everything to be used with Blender or other Software / Render Engines.

In VRay for MAYA it is simple just browse to the Monitor ICC profile from the VFB Color Management section and voila correct color!

I'm not talking about switching the monitor to sRGB mode. I want to use the whole Display Gamut with the custom profile after calibration. How can this be done with Blender? What are the necessary steps to setup a Custom Monitor Profile?

Marko
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    VRay can’t work around the limitations of ICCs, and as such, it isn’t quite that simple if the ICC is a V4 etc. Ideally, this would be done as a unique display class. https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/31068/how-can-blender-be-augmented-to-display-color-critical-and-accurate-results – troy_s Nov 12 '20 at 16:04
  • @troy_s Sorry I forgot to mention that my Vray experience comes from MAYA. (now added to original post) I'm not worrying about Dynamic Range being clipped. I just want a color accurate preview on my display. Thank you for the link! I will try to adapt this to my case. – Marko Nov 13 '20 at 07:57
  • I managed to make a transform to convert from sRGB to my monitor native gamut. And this seems to work great. But I would like to use the full monitor gamut to display the maximum amount of color possible. So what does the render engine send to OCIO? Is it spectral data, XYZ values or something else. I hope it's not just arbitrarily assigning the reference color space to the values. ...Looks like the best idea is to wait for OCIO v2 to have this functionality, but then the question is will Blender implement it? – Marko Nov 19 '20 at 16:05
  • First, I’d strongly encourage your custom colourimetry to be put in as a display. Second, the native rendering space of Blender uses BT.709 primaries. Using wider primaries brings the significant complexities of gamut mapping to the table, which brings nightmarish image artifacting to smaller gamuts. It’s an extremely challenging surface. It is not spectral of course, as the renderer is RGB model based. Typically your larger gamut volume will display the full BT.709 / sRGB gamut more fully, which is a large upside. – troy_s Nov 20 '20 at 16:56
  • @troy_s Thank you for explaining! Since Blender uses BT.709 primaries natively, does that mean that if a larger space is used in OCIO the colors loose physical meaning? The thing I'm having trouble understanding is: What is happening with the colors when they go from a renderer to OCIO? – Marko Nov 23 '20 at 10:58
  • @troy_s I did some tests with OCIO in Vray. There I can compare ICC color management with OCIO. And I have found that if I use a large color space like ACES colors look way more saturated than in sRGB. From my Photography background I would expect that the saturation of most colors would stay the same if properly converted between gamuts. If they were able to fit into sRGB they would be visually unchanged in the larger space. Only the colors which previously would not fit into the sRGB gamut would be more saturated because they were not clipped/converted into a smaller gamut. Is this correct? – Marko Nov 23 '20 at 11:12
  • They aren’t “more saturated” per se, but gamut clipped and skewed. It’s a deep rabbit hole. The problem is rendering to smaller space, and given that ACEScg is essentially BT.2020, and that no displays will reach BT.2020, everything is gamut clipped and skewed. Also, ACES default RRT rendering is absolutely hideous, leading to skews and clips. It’s a sloppy mess. Wide gamut rendering is still an unsolved problem, hence why there hasn’t been a Filmic Mark II until it could be released in good faith, without the ghastly output seen in ACES or such. – troy_s Nov 23 '20 at 14:29

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