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July 28, 2024
Question

sRGB setting on U2723QE gives undersaturated colors, while other settings oversaturated

  • July 28, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 1354 views

Hi all,

 

I noticed that if I put the Dell U2723QE monitor to the sRGB setting on Win11, the colors look much less saturated compared to the Macbook Air M2 screen. If I select any other monitor setting (e.g. 6500K), the colors are overblown. As explained to me in this post https://www.reddit.com/r/Monitors/comments/129o5sb/more_vivid_colors_on_dell_u2723qe_while_connected/ , Windows does not have good color management and oversaturates wide-gamut displays if not put into sRGB profile.

 

But why is it undersaturated in the sRGB setting? It looks washed out compared to any other display that I have and use. Also when I edit photos in Lightroom, the images do not look as they look on a Macbook, iPad, or Android phone. They are undersaturated in sRGB settings on Win11. If I put the screen to a 6500K setting, I feel like the saturation in Lightroom on Macbook and Windows match. But everything else (like Discord, and Mozilla) is oversaturated on Windows. I think that this is because Lightroom is color-managing, while other apps are not.

 

But I don't understand why the sRGB setting undersaturates the colors on Windows. Shouldn't it be "normally" saturated, similar to a Macbook?

 

I have bought the SpyderX Pro calibration tool, and it helped me solve another problem (I had different colors in the Develop and Library modules when GPU acceleration was turned on; using Win11 and RX7800XT GPU) - https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/color-shift-when-gpu-acceleration-is-on-in-lightroom-develop-mode-windows-system/m-p/14736876#M372455

 

However, the SypderX tool did not help me with saturation. How to solve it and have Windows display color accurately? Not undersaturating them in the sRGB setting, and oversaturating them in any other setting.

 

What do you recommend?

 

Thank you very much for your help in advance.

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1 reply

JohanElzenga
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 28, 2024

I'm not a Windows user so I don't know all the details of color management in Windows, but this sounds like you've made a simple mistake. What you describe sounds like you've set the monitor to sRGB, but the monitor profile is still set to the wider native gamut (P3?). That means that a color-managed app like Lightroom will send "P3 RGB-values" to the monitor, but these values are lower than the values of the same color in sRGB. And so the monitor will show a less saturated color, because it receives too low values from Lightroom.

 

-- Johan W. Elzenga