How can I test my monitors to determine if they can support Display P3?

Question

Hello.I'd like to assess the color coverage of my current monitors. While I managed to identify the Display P3 gamut by viewing images online, my interest lies in determining the percentage of the Display P3 gamut that is visible to me. So I set the color profile to Display P3 when I first created it in Photoshop. The background color was established as R255 G0 B0. I then positioned the text at the center, progressing through shades like 98% (R250 G0 B0) and 96% (R245 G0 B0), effectively working towards achieving the 90 percent threshold. This process of gradual adjustments was also applied to other colors such as Green, Blue, Black, and White. Now... This is what I'm curious about.1. Is adjusting the text color in this manner a suitable method for testing Display P3 compatibility?2. If this approach is accurate, I utilized 98% intensity values (R5 G5 B5) and 96% intensity values (R10 G10 B10) for Black. Similarly, for White, we employed 98% (R250 G250 B250) and 96% (R245 G245 B245) intensity values. However, these values appeared quite distinct on monitors not compatible with Display P3. What strategies can I employ to ensure proper perception of black and white in this context?Could someone please provide an answer to my inquiry?Thank you.

D Fosse · Accepted Answer

Display panel manufacturers (that's mostly LG and Samsung) have traditionally specified their wide gamut panels close to the standard color spaces Adobe RGB and more recently DCI-P3.

There's no particular reason for that, other than easy marketing. Monitor gamut could have any shape or form. The monitor is its own color space, and in a color managed environment it could be anything at all. The monitor profile just describes the monitor as it is.

So there was never any expectation that a wide gamut monitor should exactly match either Adobe RGB or DCI-P3. They never did and never will. Those numbers are, again, mostly marketing. It's in any case impossible to take two three-dimensional volumes and define the differences in a simple % number. It's much more complicated.

The sRGB specification was originally made as a description of a typical/average CRT monitor. Then came LCD panels, which behaved rather differently, they just had fairly similar primaries. So already sRGB is quite inaccurate as a description of actual behavior. But it stuck. And ever since, monitors have been defined in terms of standard color spaces.

With the highy saturated colors at the gamut boundary of a wide gamut monitor, I'm not sure if you can even see these small differences. That's like looking at car headlights straight on. The practical implications of gamut clipping are more about loss of texture and "air" - not saturation as such.

In short, I'm not sure this exercise has any practically useful purpose.

Conrad_C · Answer

I think I see what you’re trying to do, but it seems too imprecise to be useful. One big problem is that the shape of P3 (and other common display gamuts) is not uniform, so the shape is very irregular, meaning that figuring out one color value does not make it safe to assume the appearance of a nearby color value, unless you specifically test that one too. A simple calibration/profiling device would use the same process but very rapidly displaying and measuring a large number of color patches to achieve sufficient precision, and then it can build a precise gamut plot for you in seconds.

Like Neil said, a quick way would be to look on your computer for the default display profile that’s supposed to be associated with that display, and attach that to this thread. One of us can then open that in a gamut viewer and see what the expected coverage is supposed to be.

Another way: What is the make and model of your display? That could narrow it down extremely quickly, because most manufacturers state the gamut on the spec sheet. For example:

If the model is a conventional display (does not claim to be wide gamut), we can assume it is something around sRGB, and therefore we know for certain that it falls far short of P3 in most colors.
If the model claims to cover around 100% of the Adobe RGB gamut, we know that it will mostly overlap with P3, but reproducing more colors than Adobe RGB in some ranges and fewer colors in others.
If the model claims to cover around 100% of P3, then we’re done. You just have to make sure it’s profiled to get the most out of that display’s actual gamut.

However, these values appeared quite distinct on monitors not compatible with Display P3.
By @uzinida

This might have happened if the test image contains an embedded color profile, because that would cause color-managed applications to automatically adjust the displayed color values to reproduce appearance and color details more consistently in other display gamuts. So a color value difference in P3 would be scaled to still be visible on sRGB display, defeating the purpose of the test. Again, profiling/calibration software takes all of this into account for you and avoids these mistakes.

What strategies can I employ to ensure proper perception of black and white in this context?
By @uzinida

Because gamut shapes are not uniform, maintaining both neutral gray and linear tonal reproduction from dark to light is a challenge through simple trial and error. Again, profiling/calibration software incorporates expertise in doing this properly, so generating a custom display profile is the quickest and most reliable way to get a black and white rendering that is both neutral and linear from dark to light, in the current display gamut.

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