Notes on Gamma

Bröther, wait until I tell you about gamut

Color is so hard. From colorspaces, to bit-depth, to gamuts, to HDR vs SDR, to ICC profiles. And your hard work is getting displayed on a $20 Wal-mart Android tablet in bright sunlight.

With "unmanaged sRGB" mode turned on by default, because look at the vivid colors!

Apple has its faults but the out-of-the-box display quality is second to none.

The nice thing about Apple owning the whole stack is the color management is pretty decent. Really good for testing your stuff to see how it would look if everyone had calibrated displays with the correct settings all the way through the entire software stack.

I keep a janky 10 year old display hooked up so I can drag my content over to it and see how bad it's going to look on everyone else's systems.

The amazing thing is that it's one of the oldest fields of study when it comes to human perception, yet it's still an active space with tons of new technologies, techniques and discoveries.

If you dig deep enough into the "best" way to map HDR values to a monitor (HDR or SDR), you'll eventually reach active discussions on the ACES forum, with new techniques and transforms posted constantly.

The other trick they have is really good ambient lighting compensation. Google just added something similar to the Pixel series, but it's not quite as good as Apple's implementation. AFAIK Apple have custom driver ICs and panels, which probably gives them way more control.

You can lose an entire lifetime going down the rabbit hole of trying to really understand the full differences between HDR and SDR :p