Which color profiles for game compatibility

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Nicholars

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Jan 10, 2012
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I have the option to make LUT profiles or matrix profiles or LUT + matrix etc etc.

Which is the best for game compatibility and also to avoid banding etc? That I can force with a program and will actually work in games?

LUT, Matrix 1x 3x, LUT + matrix etc...

Which one should I create / use for games?

Mainly trying to fix a blue tint on my TV, which cannot be fixed with the TV controls.

Thanks
 
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AFAIK the only one that will work is the one loaded in your card's LUT. As far as forcing it to stay active in games, I don't think there is a trouble free, works-for-all solution.
 
As opposed to movies, games are not subject to industry color standard. Thus, it is mostly a matter of taste.

Personally, with the help of a colorimeter, I like a gamma of 2.35-2.4 and brightness at 90cd/m2 as I play games in a dark environment.
 
I cannot fix it with the TV's controls, main problem is blue tinted black shades, (which will either be blue, red or green using the TV options, it only has 2pt white balance controls and they don't work well enough) but I am not sure which option to select for profile type that will be most likely to work in games (forced with app).. these are the options available. Even if all I can get is a decent greyscale + gamma and have that work in most games that will be better than nothing.

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I think you should be fine with single curve + matrix.

Once the calibration is done, it will load the curves into your video LUT, and so long as you can get your game to respect your video LUT, you'll be fine.

Some games have options where you can choose to respect the video LUT. Others don't. For those that don't, there is software that can attempt to force the video LUT to remain in effect while the game is running.

cpkeeper is one.
 
spacediver said:
I think you should be fine with single curve + matrix.

Once the calibration is done, it will load the curves into your video LUT, and so long as you can get your game to respect your video LUT, you'll be fine.

Some games have options where you can choose to respect the video LUT. Others don't. For those that don't, there is software that can attempt to force the video LUT to remain in effect while the game is running.

cpkeeper is one.
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Would it not be better to use XYZ LUT + matrix? That is the default option, will games only use the matrix part anyway? I am a bit confused about the differences and mainly what will give the best possible result in games, how long it takes is not a problem I can leave it on overnight.

I will also want to use it for films, if I can get one profile to work for everything with decent results that would be ideal.
 
You should probably go through the dispcalgui documentation. For 1dLUT purposes (which is what you're concerned with), I have a feeling that this option will have less of an impact than if you were using color managed modules with color transforms.

Also go through this thread.

As for films, so long as your media player doesn't ignore the gamma ramps loaded into your video card, you'll be fine.
 
Thanks.. So if I am using curve + matrix, isn't it better to use curves + matrix? Instead of a single curve? I have read the dispcalgui manual but I still don't know what to use! Main problem is removing blue tint and proper gamma. I am thinking of just buying a whole new TV with proper color controls because this TV is annoying me!
 
Why not experiment. You can easily assess the quality of the result using HCFR (or even dispcalgui - it probably has a calibration report). Towards the end of the WinDAS white point balance guide, there are instructions on how to measure your grayscale accuracy in HCFR.
 
I did all this about a year ago, made loads of different profiles etc. I have HCFR already have the best possible using the TV's controls... All I want to do this time is just get it the best possible as quickly as possible and leave it alone! So do I want single curve or curves + matrix or LUT + matrix? Best possible quality that should work with most games?
 
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The best possible quality is the one that produces the best 1d lut, period. It's not like one option will produce different quality for games per se.

So, like I said. Do an experiment. Do it with single curve and curves, and compare your delta E's and gamma after each. Whichever one produces the lowest delta E and a gamma closer to your target is the one you can choose.

Also, creating a profile is irrelevant for you. You're solely concerned with calibration curves for the 1D lut loaded into your video card. Anything else will have zero impact, unless you are in a situation where you are connecting different device profiles, and working with color transforms with color aware software (none of which I assume you are doing).
 
Nicholars said:
I did all this about a year ago, made loads of different profiles etc. I have HCFR already have the best possible using the TV's controls... All I want to do this time is just get it the best possible as quickly as possible and leave it alone! So do I want single curve or curves + matrix or LUT + matrix? Best possible quality that should work with most games?
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Spacediver linked some really great information, why don't you try reading through it? If you're asking this question, then you quite obviously haven't read any of the documentation about profile types located in the dispcalgui guide.

There is no answer to your question. Experiment. If you want the best color, then you need to work for it, and understand what you're working with.
 
Nikyo said:
Spacediver linked some really great information, why don't you try reading through it? If you're asking this question, then you quite obviously haven't read any of the documentation about profile types located in the dispcalgui guide.

There is no answer to your question. Experiment. If you want the best color, then you need to work for it, and understand what you're working with.
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I have done a lot of reading and I am still confused... I will just try "curves + matrix" and see if that works then, as far as I know that should be reasonably accurate and compatible with most applications and games etc. There is the default option of LUT + matrix but it says that is less compatible and as was said, I am not sure that is the correct option for what I want.

The profiling part of dispcalgui is irrelevant for what I am doing and I just need to be concerned about the calibration part? How will it remove the blue tint without that? The profiles will not work at all in any games?
 
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All you need to care about is how accurate your display is with respect to sRGB/ Rec 709. You can measure this directly with HCFR. That is all you should care about. It's not like one option in dispcalgui will be more or less compatible with "most applications and games" relative to other options.

So, once again. If you are concerned, do two calibrations, and measure the results with each.

I also recommend reading the introduction to the WinDAS guide, as it will provide you with the conceptual framework to understand what color accuracy actually means.
 
It does not matter, game does not use a profile. As long as windows load the 1dlut you are done. Heck you dont even need a profile portion for any un-managed apps. It wont change the calibration result, because it is "PROFILING".

And try to play game in borderless windowed or windowed mode if you want the 1dlut is actually used.
 
You will have to run almost all games in windowed mode for the gpu lut to not get reset to default.
 
Thanks for reply, I am trying to calibrate using the video preset with 1886 2.4 gamma.

On the TV's white balance I cannot make dark shades a neutral color... I tried using the least amount of changes on TV controls and setting black point correction "auto", just end up going from 2700:1 contrast to 1900:1 contrast and the blacks are green tinted now...

Can you tell me how to minimise the blue tint (I would still prefer it was blue tinted instead of green or red, but using the TV's controls it has far too much blue tint) with BT1886 2.4 Gamma etc. On this TV I can get everything perfect... EXCEPT the blacks are always tinted with either RGB and the contrast goes down. Then if I lower the RGB Bias enough using the TV controls so that there is no blue tint, it will lose all black detail. I don't know why this is so hard to fix! Should I be using "black point correction" in dispcalgui, everything I can get calibrated almost perfectly, except I cannot get the blacks and any shades below about 15% to have neutral grey and keep most of the contrast, can you advise me on what settings to try on both the TV and DispcalGUI? Will using more patches help? I used 1600 patches in that one... should I try 3000 patches?

Also is CPkeeper the best app to force the profile? (I have 2 screens, a TV and a monitor)

Any help appreciated thanks
 
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Can you show us a calibration report, please?

Also, what colorimeter are you using?

You often have to sacrifice a bit of contrast to get good grayscale tracking across the entire range, depending on how off the TV is to begin with. You might find this guide useful for learning to how to use the RGB gain and bias controls in your tv, though depending on the technology your tv uses, results may vary. It is good practice to hardware calibrate before fine tuning with a software LUT.
 
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I am using a colormunki. Even if I get a good profile I cannot see how to force it in games, CPkeeper will not work for full screen games and borderlesswindowedgaming does not work half the time either. Also why does my TV which was RRP of over £1000 when released (2nd best model available) have a massive blue tint.

I read through all that you linked before... I know what to do pretty much, and what to calibrate to (except slightly confused about profile types, curves + matrix, LUT + Matrix etc.)

The problem is that my TV will not work properly at any settings, I have tried every combination of settings possible on the TV and it will either have blue, red or green tinted black shades. At default on warm2 it has a massive blue tint across the whole range with blue about 20-30% higher than red and green.... I can fix this to some extent with the TV controls and with a profile but then that will not work properly in games.
 
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I'm assuming you did a hardware adjustment on your TV using the internal controls, and then ran dispcalgui. I'd like to see the final result. In particular, primaries, grayscale tracking performance, gamma, and min and max luminance.
 
Ok but the dispcalgui result does not look good in practice because blacks are green. I will take some screenshots later of the best I can get using the TV controls and what it looks like after a profile... It might be tomorrow because I will leave another profile on overnight with different settings.
 
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No I mean the screenshots of the greyscale etc. look alright on the measurements.. but in actual use when testing with films or images etc. the blacks are obviously green. I can calibrate it using the TV controls so the greyscale looks almost flat with a bit of wonkyness near the blacks but unfortunately in actual use it looks worse than a blue tint because the blacks are a sort of yellowy sick color, if this TV had full 10/20 point color controls etc. it would be easy to fix...

I was looking at using the service menu to correct it, but I have no idea what the numbers mean... eg. B_BCK 512 r_BCK 512, I know B_BCK means blue bias, I guess the 512 is the brightness I don't know or what I would need to change it to. It seems like it would be a lot easier if I can get it looking decent with the hardware controls, because color profiles and games seems like a lot of trouble for something that will not work properly all the time.
 
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Do you know what a calibration report is? Do you understand the concept of primaries, chromaticity, delta E?
 
spacediver said:
Do you know what a calibration report is? Do you understand the concept of primaries, chromaticity, delta E?
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The report that comes out when you complete a profile with dispcalgui or HCFR?

Primaries = how close the primary colors are to reference
Chromaticity = if the hue and saturation of colors is correct (?)
delta e = the measurement of how far from reference eg. higher = worse

Is that correct?
 
More or less. The chromaticities are objective quantities that can be physically measured. Chromaticity by itself is not correct or incorrect.

I want to see a report that shows the chromaticity of your display primaries (or, even better, a diagram that shows the location of your actual primaries vs the location of the sRGB/Rec 709 reference primaries).

I also want to see delta E values at 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 % grayscale.
 
spacediver said:
More or less. The chromaticities are objective quantities that can be physically measured. Chromaticity by itself is not correct or incorrect.

I want to see a report that shows the chromaticity of your display primaries (or, even better, a diagram that shows the location of your actual primaries vs the location of the sRGB/Rec 709 reference primaries).

I also want to see delta E values at 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 100 % grayscale.
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Screenshots of the HCFR results?
 
Ok I will post some tomorrow, I will try another calibration tonight, see if using more patches makes any difference. Don't know if I should be using black point compensation or not, I tried it a few times but it seems to cause more problems. eg. much lower contrast and the blacks will be green instead of blue. I will try using about 3000 patches although I don't know if it will make any difference.
 
well according to the dispcalgui documentation:

Black point compensation (enable “Show advanced options” in the “Options” menu)

(Note: This option has no effect if just calibrating and creating a simple curves + matrix profile directly from the calibration data without additional profiling measurements)

This effectively prevents black crush when using the profile, but at the expense of accuracy. It is generally best to only use this option when it is not certain that the applications you are going to use have a high quality color management implementation. For LUT profiles, more sophisticated options exist (i.e. advanced gamut mapping options and use either “Enhance effective resolution of colorimetric PCS-to-device tables”, which is enabled by default, or “Gamut mapping for perceptual intent”, which can be used to create a perceptual table that maps the black point).
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Would it not be better to use XYZ LUT + matrix?
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It doesn't matter. Games are not colormanaged. There will be no transformations from and to a PCS based on participating profiles. Maximum you can achive is to maintain the linearization data contained in the display profiles vcgt (only if you don't have a display that can be hardware-calibrated) which is loaded into the videocard LUT. This proprietary tag is the same for CLUT and matrix-shaper profiles and represents a simple 1D-LUT.

Regarding color managed workflows (Photoshop etc.): A display (self-luminous device) that can't be described by a simple matrix-shaper profile after linearization (=> calibration) is not suitable for any color critical work - a thick CLUT profile won't change this. Their domain is to characterize much more complex output processes.
 
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Sailor_Moon said:
It doesn't matter. Games are not colormanaged. There will be no transformations from and to a PCS based on participating profiles. Maximum you can achive is to maintain the linearization data contained in the display profiles vcgt (only if you don't have a display that can be hardware-calibrated) which is loaded into the videocard LUT. This proprietary tag is the same for CLUT and matrix-shaper profiles and represents a simple 1D-LUT.

Regarding color managed workflows (Photoshop etc.): A display (self-luminous device) that can't be described by a simple matrix-shaper profile after linearization (=> calibration) is not suitable for any color critical work - a thick CLUT profile won't change this. Their domain is to characterize much more complex output processes.
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Right, I think I understand most of that, so it won't make any difference what type (curve, curves, LUT)? Not sure if I should leave it on the default setting (LUT + matrix) or change it to "curves + matrix" or if it won't make any difference either way? Will using xxxx number of patches make the 1DLUT more accurate? If all I can get is accurate greyscale, 1886 gamma and no blue tinted blacks... that would be a lot better.
 
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spacediver said:
well according to the dispcalgui documentation:
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Sorry I meant black point correction, not black point compensation, it lowers the contrast from 2700:1 to about 1900:1 and makes the blacks a different color (green). Anyway I will try again and hopefully get a better result... Does the amount of patches even make any difference for what I am trying to do? It should make it more accurate? I am still confused about LUT vs curves vs 1Dlut etc.

So It makes no difference what I use (curve, curves, LUT)..... All I need to get is the best possible 1DLUT (more patches should help make that more accurate?)...... as that is all that will work in games. Is "1DLUT" and "+matrix" the same thing?

I think I need to read more about this, so I understand what all these things mean exactly... all I am trying to do with the TV is fix the blue tint and gamma, those are the main problems with the TV, Will the 1DLUT be able to fix that?
 
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You want to use the TV internal control as much as possible. If it is a high tier TV,I assume there will be a thread dedicated to it on AVS forum. Ideally, I think you should use hcfr first for tuning the TV controls.

Anything under the profiling tab won't help your case.

And just stick with 2.2 gamma for now.
 
baii said:
You want to use the TV internal control as much as possible. If it is a high tier TV,I assume there will be a thread dedicated to it on AVS forum. Ideally, I think you should use hcfr first for tuning the TV controls.

Anything under the profiling tab won't help your case.

And just stick with 2.2 gamma for now.
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Thats the problem, for a high tier Tv, the color controls (as with all Sony TV's) are absolute &*^%. So the only way I can fix it is using a profile.
 
Nicholars said:
Sorry I meant black point correction, not black point compensation, it lowers the contrast from 2700:1 to about 1900:1 and makes the blacks a different color (green). Anyway I will try again and hopefully get a better result... Does the amount of patches even make any difference for what I am trying to do? It should make it more accurate? I am still confused about LUT vs curves vs 1Dlut etc.
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Black point compensation should make the colors more accurate, at the expense of contrast.

Like I said, just do a calibration and let's see the results. We'll go from there.

Also generally good practice to list the display model you're using.
 
spacediver said:
Black point compensation should make the colors more accurate, at the expense of contrast.

Like I said, just do a calibration and let's see the results. We'll go from there.

Also generally good practice to list the display model you're using.
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The TV is a Sony KDL 40HX723, few years old now but was 2nd best model when I got it (similar to the HX923 except not full local dimming)...The contrast is as good as any new LED and it has the edge LED dimming. I really don't know why it has such a massive blue tint and why it is so hard to remove near black without going green or red, not sure if I should try to fix it in the service menu or not (anyone know what I need to change the B_BCK and B_DRIVE settings to?), I will do another profile without black point compensation and see what that does... I am losing hope of ever actually fixing the problem.

Any ideas what profile and what settings I should use for best results (dispcalgui)? Which are the most important settings for what will actually work in games? Why is the profiling part irrelevant? I understand most of the stuff about calibrating except I am still confused about profiling vs calibrating... I can post some screenshots of HCFR using the TV settings only (will do that in a bit). Thanks for help BTW this problem is annoying me... last year I did about 20 or 30+ profiles using an eye one pro, maybe 3 of them were actually an improvement, I lost those profiles and now I have an colormunki which is a lot slower so I have to leave it overnight and would like to get a decent result that works in games with as little messing about as possible.

I will take some screenshots, I am still confused about what parts actually work in games and if they will fix the blue tint, I assume the gamma settings that correct the gamma to BT 1886 will work in games but will the part of the profile that fixes the blue tint work in games? Is the part that would fix the blue tint not the profile part? eg. "xxx color should be xxx" or is that loaded into VCGT with the 1DLUT?... Is the 1D LUT the calibration which will fix colors and gamma etc. as much as possible... then the profiling part is a profile of the calibration which corrects it further (but the 2nd part will not work in games). Why wouldn't using more patches help with the accuracy of the 1DLUT? Is there any way of improving the 1DLUT after it has been created? I will post some screenshots of HCFR without a profile later on, maybe you can help, but I have literally tried every setting and combination of settings possible, except the service menu and getting a profile that fixes the problems / works in games.

This is the best result I can get using the TV's controls... It looks ok there, but in reality the screen looks very green and the blacks are a sort of brown sick color. That is the closest possible with the dark colors UNDER the green point (I read that "colors near black can only be added, not removed") so is that the best starting point for a profile? Any other settings the blue will be much higher than red and green unless I lower the blue bias so much that I cannot see any of the first 16 squares on a black detail test.

dfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdfdsfsdfdsfdsfsdfsd.jpg
 
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