So I was reminded yet again recently why I so much despise color management, especially in Windows. This is half rant, half looking for answers, and half-random things I’ve noticed about color management. Not that I was actively looking for any of this mind you. In the weeks since I wrote about old colorimeters and modern displays I’ve run across a couple more amusing but notable tidbits of color management fun.

Color management, at least the technical stuff behind it, is something to me of an arcane art. I don’t at all understand what’s going on, so don’t look at me to explain anything here or grant any great insight. In fact, while I’m quite comfortable profiling my displays and getting acceptable results, I still dread my quarterly re-profiling runs.

Color management in Windows is, at best, a tragically chaotic affair. The OS doesn’t do color management globally, applications have to opt into color management, and it seems only certain parts of them get managed or there’s an interaction between display profile and what’s rendered that completely alludes me.

Worse, Microsoft didn’t bother to implement color management in most OS related areas—especially annoying to me is the desktop background. Further, where they did implement color management it’s not always complete. For example, the Windows Photo viewer is actually color managed, but if you use an ICC version 4-color profile, it loses the plot.

Which raises the question, why bother with ICC v4 profiles in the first place?

Not to put too fine of a point on it, the give you better color accuracy.

I haven’t done anything extensive with this, but I was curious why my SpectraView display kept measuring so poorly in terms of Delta E (ΔE). For those that aren’t familiar with it, ΔE is the difference between colors—typically with displays it’s the difference between the color displayed and the color that should have been displayed. The idea is that the lower the ΔE, the closer the colors are.

For a display, a ΔE of 1 is good; the vast majority of people won’t be able to see a difference between the color that is and the color it’s supposed to be. Professional color critical displays will usually do better than that. Most consumer displays are a lot worse.

On my desk I have 3 displays a Dell E248WFP, which is a cheap TN panel consumer level display; a Dell Ultrasharp U2408WFP, which is a respectable semi-high end PVA panel; and an NEC PA241W-BK, a color critical IPS display. The cheap TN display, after calibration has a ΔE around 2.3; the Ultrasharp, around 1.2; and here’s where the fun with profiles shows up.

Using an ICC Version 2 table based profile, my SpectraView II measures with a ΔE of 1.1. However, switching around to a matrix base version 4 ICC profile, drops the ΔE to 0.7.

So I’ve switched back to V4 matrix profiles, and solved the somewhat confusing question of why my display suddenly seemed to tank sometime earlier this year.

Of course, one might be asking why I switched from the i1 recommended V4 matrix profile back to the V2 table profile. The answer, unsurprisingly, is Windows; specifically the Windows Photo Viewer, which is incapable of using V4 matrix profiles. Of course, the solution to that is just to use something other than Windows Photo Viewer to preview images, like say IrfanView.

As I said, I hate color management.