Comparing gamuts

[Damien Symonds]

I've just bought a new LCD monitor, and calibrated/profiled it with my Eye One Display 2.

I'm interested to know how my monitor's gamut compares to the sRGB and Adobe RGB colour spaces.

Does anybody know of any free software that will show a 3D model of my monitor's profile, and compare it with other profiles? (My idle curiosity doesn't justify the purchase of software, I'm afraid.)

Or, are there other ways to compare gamuts?

Thanks for your help.

[Doug Kerr]

Hi, Damien,

Does anybody know of any free software that will show a 3D model of my monitor's profile, and compare it with other profiles? (My idle curiosity doesn't justify the purchase of software, I'm afraid.)

These are a number of programs that will perform a "3D" display of a gamut, derived from a profile. Unfortunately,all those I know of are not free. (Several of them allow a demonstration mode, in which they will perform on one or two standard color space gamuts, such as sRGB.)

One that does a nice job is ColorThink. It is available here:

http://www2.chromix.com/colorthink/std/

Maybe someone else here will know of a nice free one - I'd be interested, too.

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

Hi Damien, Doug,

One that does a nice job is ColorThink. It is available here:

http://www2.chromix.com/colorthink/std/

Maybe someone else here will know of a nice free one - I'd be interested, too.

The following is 'free' (under the GNU licence):http://www.argyllcms.com/ (http://www.argyllcms.com/)

Go to the Online documentation link (http://www.argyllcms.com/doc/ArgyllDoc.html) of that page, and scroll down to "Main Utilities by category:" secton, where you'll find a "Creating gamut views" subsection with three file documentation links (the actual applications can be downloaded from the home page in a pre-compiled version for several OS platforms). Hey, it's free, you didn't ask for simple ... ;-)

Especially the possibility to make a 3D model of a TIFF file is interesting IMHO, because many actual images don't use the full gamut that's available (e.g. there's very little saturated blue or green in a red tomato, if that's the subject ...). That could be used to find the smallest gamut that envelops the colors that need to be encoded for a specific image content. It can be slow though, depending on the parameters used, so don't go overboard with the parameters on the first attempt.

To view the resulting VRML files in 3D a suitable viewer needs to be installed, The Cortona VRML client plugin (http://www.parallelgraphics.com/products/cortona/) is one example.

For frequent use of such tools, e.g. to check one's workflow requirements, a paid utility like GamutVision (http://www.gamutvision.com/) could be a real time saver.

Bart

[JohanElzenga]

If you use a Macintosh, you already have that software. It's called ColorSync Utility.

[Michael Fontana]

and it looks like that:

http://imago.macbay.de/OPF/CM/LaCie-526_hardware_cal.jpg

you can turn it arround, within the app.

So if you' ve a friend with a mac, just send him your display profil plus Ad98, sRGB, etc..

[Bart_van_der_Wolf]

[...]
you can turn it arround, within the app.

So if you' ve a friend with a mac, just send him your display profil plus Ad98, sRGB, etc..

This Microsoft 'power toy (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1e33dca0-7721-43ca-9174-7f8d429fbb9e&DisplayLang=en)' may be similar, but it doesn't compare, it just displays.

Bart

[Damien Symonds]

Thanks for your suggestions, everyone. I'll try some of them out tonight.

[Chris Lilley]

This Microsoft 'power toy (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1e33dca0-7721-43ca-9174-7f8d429fbb9e&DisplayLang=en)' may be similar, but it doesn't compare, it just displays.


In fact it does allow two gamuts to be compared. One can be displayed as a mesh and the other solid; there is also control over opacity.

It doesn't give any metrics (like percent of colours in one gamut that are outside the other), just a visual comparison.