How to tame a wide gamut display?

[Rhodesy]

Some time ago we bought a 27inch dell that has a colour wide gamut with the thinking its going to be a pro monitor and great for our viz work. But its always been a struggle as we work in sRGB and dont actually require the wide gammut as 99% of our clients will be looking at our work on sRGB monitors and my thinking is if a photograph looks good enough on there then so will our renders.

So the problem is things like windows 10 photos and any web browser massively over saturates colours and there have been real issues with vray in the past with editor window previews looking different to the frame buffer. I dont think corona is as bad for this though its been a while since I have done tests. It has been calibrated in the past with a spyder pro and then more recently with an xrite pro so we are confident photoshop is correct its just viewing stuff that is outside of photoshop.

I personally use a 32inch BenQ 100% sRGB monitor now but my colleague uses the Dell still. So my question is has anyone managed to calibrate or somehow switch off the wide gamut range in a monitor? I also had a laptop with a wide gamut display and wouldnt do it again as that had the same problem with eye searing saturation. My main concern is most monitors these days are becoming wide gamut and I dont think its a good thing! I like the look of the dell canvas or even a cintiq but they are all wide gamut so potentially its just going to have the same problem.

[Juraj]

Widegamut Ultrasharps are closed systems and depending on model offer hardware (inner 3D LUT) calibration through Dell software suite and X-Rite iDisplay pro (you have to use Dell's suite, not X-Rite's own, but it's very easy :- ) and user friendly).

Calibrate to generic 120cdm/Gamma 2.2/sRGB space and then use generated profile in monitor (CAL1/CAL2) and .icc profile into system (or incorrect, but still manageable generic sRGB .icc).

The issue is purely on 3dsMax/Corona side as everything else is already damn good color managed (except idiotic Windows "Photo" app which by default opens images, just swap to older Windows "Photo viewer")

-User of U3014 with lot of pain : /

[Rhodesy]

Thanks Juraj. Yes I was hoping there was some way of calibrating out or switching off of the wide gamut feature so it physically clamped it no matter what the program. I think all our crucial bits of software take on board the calibration and dont show the over saturated colours now though. We will try the old windows photo viewer instead of 'photos' as that is where its most obvious to us when we are reviewing images after we have saved out of photoshop. We tried Irfan view and that still showed the wide gamut. Fortunately photoshop seems to work OK. We had problems for years with vrayforC4D showing over saturated viewport renders (which was dismissed by the vrayforc4d team as an issue) but now with v3 the problem has gone away magically! So its less of a problem now and corona seems fine which is our main engine these days. My main concern is that a lot of 'pro' monitors now are offering billions of colours which makes me uneasy.

[Juraj]

By calibrating to sRGB space only you do clamp the monitor so the "issue" goes away :- ). You just loose the colors we paid for : /

Not sure why they cannot add the same color management that Maya has. All 3dsMax has is gamma and some stupid Autodesk LUT, whatever that is (I tried, and didn't find any use).

Corona framebuffer lacks color management too, so it will show out of gamut. Pokoy mentioned VFB+ had option to load .icc to color manage, I never tried it. Still, you would have over-saturated material editor, so it's only 50perc. solution.