How Do P3 Displays Affect Your Workflow?

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Some new displays use a color space called P3, which is different than the sRGB and Adobe RGB color spaces that designers and photographers have used for years. Is P3 an improvement or a complication? It’s a little of both.

What Are Color Spaces?

A color space, or color gamut, is a range of colors. The sRGB color space is widely used for color graphics files, displays, printers, and other devices. Almost all displays can reproduce sRGB or something close to it, and sRGB is good enough for moderate quality color printing. It’s a convenient common ground.

However, many creative professionals work in the Adobe RGB color space because it’s significantly larger than sRGB. It can represent more of the greater color ranges that professional cameras, scanners, and printers can reproduce. Displays that can show larger-than-sRGB gamuts, such as Adobe RGB, are called wide gamut displays.

sRGB gamut vs. Adobe RGB

Adobe RGB is called a wide gamut color space because it can reproduce a larger range of colors than sRGB. (Based on a Lab color graph from Apple ColorSync Utility.)

What’s P3?

Now there are displays using the P3 color space. Like Adobe RGB, P3 is a wide-gamut alternative to sRGB. The DCI-P3 color gamut started out as a standard for digital cinema because it’s based on the color range reproduced by the type of digital projector you’d find at a movie theater. Apple created their own version called Display P3, adapting it for computer displays and making some aspects of it more consistent with sRGB. You might already be using a P3 display: many newer Apple devices have them, such as newer iMac and MacBook Pro computers, iPad Pro tablets, and some iPhone models. And this isn’t just an Apple thing. Microsoft chose a P3 display for their Surface Studio desktop computer.

The P3 comparisons in this article are based on the Display P3 color profile included with recent Mac computers.

How Does P3 Compare to Adobe RGB and sRGB?

Adobe RGB and P3 are similarly larger than sRGB and have a lot of colors in common. Adobe RGB leans more toward blues and greens, while P3 extends a little more into yellows and reds.

sRGB gamut vs. Adobe RGB vs. P3

Adobe RGB and Apple Display P3 cover mostly similar ranges of colors beyond sRGB.

For print workflows, Adobe RGB is generally more aligned with prepress color spaces. This isn’t surprising: Adobe RGB exists in part because Adobe wanted to have an RGB color space that included CMYK colors that fall outside of sRGB. Whether the difference matters to you depends on the CMYK standard you use. An Adobe RGB display can have an edge over P3 in covering some extreme cyan colors, but if you’re currently using an sRGB display, a P3 display will still show you more of the CMYK color range than you’re seeing now.

P3, Adobe RGB, and sRGB compared to Coated FOGRA39

A P3 or Adobe RGB display can reproduce more colors of the FOGRA39 CMYK standard than an sRGB display, but Adobe RGB may be a better fit.

But not everyone prints on a press. Some photo quality inkjet printers can reproduce colors that typical presses and sRGB displays cannot. In the next illustration, the P3 and Adobe RGB displays both seem to be a roughly equal (though not perfect) match for the specific combination of printer, ink, and paper shown. Much of that photo printer’s gamut can’t be reproduced on an sRGB display.

P3, Adobe RGB, and sRGB compared to Epson Exhibition Fiber on a Stylus Pro 3880

Both P3 and Adobe RGB displays can reproduce much of the gamut of Epson Stylus Pro 3880 printer inks on Epson Exhibition Fiber paper, while an sRGB display falls short of the printer’s color range.

How a P3 Display Fits Into a Production Workflow

Fortunately, working with a P3 display is no different than correctly using an Adobe RGB or sRGB display. Color-managed applications such as Photoshop, Photoshop Lightroom, and InDesign automatically use whichever display profile is selected in your Mac or Windows system preferences. A P3 display is no problem as long as the selected display profile accurately describes that display. And as long as images and other documents are tagged with an appropriate color profile, color-managed applications can reproduce colors consistently on a P3 display.

You probably don’t need to change the settings in the Edit > Color Settings dialog box in Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator. The way you set up Color Settings should be based on the requirements of your production workflow, not on the specific display you use.

It’s trickier for workflows involving applications that don’t use color management, such as some web browsers, video editing applications, and web design software. Applications that don’t use system-level color management may display oversaturated colors on a P3 or Adobe RGB display because they’ll incorrectly assume the display is sRGB-based.

Some wide-gamut displays let you limit their gamut to sRGB in the display itself, independently of the computer. This can be a good way to prevent oversaturated colors in non-color-managed workflows. But some wide-gamut displays, including Apple P3 displays, don’t have that option. Another option is to connect an inexpensive sRGB display to your computer and view non-color-managed content on that display.

Wide Gamut Displays Are Here to Stay

It used to be that wide gamut display issues weren’t something most people ran into unless they made a conscious decision to buy an Adobe RGB monitor. But now that the price of Adobe RGB displays has gone down and Apple and Microsoft are selling millions of devices with P3 displays to consumers, wide gamut is rapidly going mainstream.

Mobile devices are not as advanced as desktop computers when it comes to color management. Recognizing this, Apple added system-level color management in iOS 9.3. Based on the ColorSync color management that Macs have used for many years, iOS color management helps reproduce color consistently on iOS devices with wide gamut P3 displays. Color management is not yet built into the Android operating system.

The current standard for HDTV uses sRGB as its color space, but that’s also changing because video is rapidly moving beyond today’s 1080p (2K) HDTV standard to 4K and 8K resolutions, high dynamic range… and wide gamut color. A new industry standard called Ultra HD Premium incorporates these advanced video features. To handle wide gamut, DCI-P3 is the delivery color space specified by Ultra HD Premium. So while P3 is largely aimed at theater projection workflows at the moment, mass market television and video workflows should eventually replace sRGB with wide gamut P3.

For years, an easy way to avoid color management was to assume that non-color-managed sRGB would look “good enough” everywhere. That assumption is no longer going to hold up as more computers and mobile devices use wide gamut displays. During this transition from sRGB to wide gamut, knowing how to keep your colors consistent across sRGB and wide gamut devices will be an increasingly valuable skill.

A P3 Display Is an Upgrade From sRGB

If you’re currently using an sRGB display, getting a P3 display is a definite step up. It reproduces a wider color range than sRGB, and it’s close enough to Adobe RGB that the differences are usually minor. As with Adobe RGB, working with the P3 color gamut shouldn’t complicate your workflow if it’s color-managed. If you have at least some experience using color management and color profiles, you’ve got a great head start on the wide gamut future.

(Note: The illustrations in this article are useful for basic comparisons, but comparing gamuts is a lot more complex than this article has room to explain. For example, the size and shape of a gamut changes as colors get lighter or darker. The simplified gamut illustrations in this article are 2D adaptations of 3D Lab color plots from Apple ColorSync Utility.)

Conrad Chavez is the author of Adobe Photoshop Classroom in a Book (2023 release), and contributes to CreativePro.com and CreativePro Magazine. You can find out more about Conrad at his website, conradchavez.com.
  • James Holloway says:

    Thanks Conrad, best article I’ve read on dci-p3. As I understand you, if I calibrate an iMac retina P-3 (with color munki in my case) and edit images in Photoshop or Lightroom, then export as Tiffs or jpegs, an editor in a color managed system could use my P-3 profiles for CMYK printing without unexpected color or saturation shifts?

    Also, do you recommend AdobeRGB or ProPhoto as a Photoshop working space with P-3?

    • Conrad Chavez says:

      Hi James! The short answer to your first question is yes, don’t worry about it.

      The long answer has some subtle but important details to be aware of. When you work in Photoshop, editing happens within the color gamut of the profile already embedded in the document. For example, if you open an image saved from a digital camera as JPEG with an sRGB profile and you don’t change it along the way, sRGB is the profile embedded in that image regardless of the Photoshop working space setting, and sRGB is what it will carry forward to the next editor. The working space applies only when a document doesn’t have an embedded profile, because then Photoshop has to assume a gamut of some kind, so it assumes the working space.

      The point of that long paragraph is that nowhere is the display profile involved in the editing itself, and it isn’t embedded in the image. Your P3 display profile is used only for the on-the-fly conversion of the image from the document profile to your display profile. The display profile affects how accurately you see the colors, but it’s the document profile that affects the color range used when editing and exporting.

      Now on to your question about color shifts. There still may be color shifts just because CMYK can‘t reproduce all of the colors in RGB color spaces; that will never be eliminated just by changing the display. But in theory such shifts should be a little easier to see on a P3 or Adobe RGB display instead of an sRGB display. And any color shifts resulting from RGB to CMYK conversion should be no worse than you would have seen on an sRGB display, because the display gamut is not involved in the actual color conversions or editing. Editing is done strictly within the document profile, while conversion is strictly between the document profile and output profile.

      So back to the short version: The next editor will see the image’s embedded document profile, whether it’s sRGB, Adobe RGB, or ProPhoto RGB (or a specific CMYK profile). They will view the image colors through whatever their display profile is, and the final printed colors will be the result of the conversion from the document profile to whatever the printer profile is.

      Regarding your second question, that’s answered where the article says ”The way you set up Color Settings should be based on the requirements of your production workflow, not on the specific display you use.“ In other words, whether you use Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB for images depends on which one is a better fit for the final output — not which one is a better match for any of the displays used during production. Most jobs headed for prepress are OK with Adobe RGB because it’s a good match for CMYK printed color. If you choose ProPhoto RGB, it should be because you anticipate that there are colors outside Adobe RGB that need to be reproduced AND you know the output device can reproduce them (e.g., pro-quality inkjet photo printers).

      The story is the same for Lightroom except that it works with all edited images in its own custom ProPhoto-based working space designed to work well with a range of printed and screen outputs. But you don’t have to know those details, because the profile that’s embedded in the finished image is the one you specified in Export settings or Preferences.

      One last factor (more sleep-inducing tech details, sorry) is whether you edit your images at 8 bits per channel or 16bpc. sRGB and Adobe RGB are OK to edit at 8bpc, but if you choose ProPhoto RGB you should edit at 16bpc in Photoshop to avoid banding. (Lightroom always edits in 16bpc.)

      That was a long reply, but color management is always full of conditions like “if,” “except,” and “but…” :) I hope it’s more clarifying than confusing!

      • James Holloway says:

        Thanks Conrad for your helpful and expert reply. Some of my in-camera Raw images are sRGB and some AdobeRGB and I want to be sure to change them all to AdobeRGB before editing. I look forward to reading your other articles and visiting your website.

      • Anirban B says:

        For a printed photograph, if I calibrate the printer as well alongside the MacBook Pro laptop, would be logically producing the same CMYK color amount? Though, eyes’ perception will have ultimate justification. [I always prefer bigger AdobeRGB monitor but shifting life :) ]

  • Rob says:

    Hi, great article, love it. Just wanted to add that one factor often overlooked is the colors present in the image themselves, as in how saturated are the colors of the picture and is a wide color space really needed to include the colors. My perception is that sometimes small color spaces (such as sRGB) are not favored because there is a perception that a lot of colors are excluded, however if the image consists of mainly desaturated colors (e.g. skin tones, desaturated earthy tone clothing etc.) possibly not even half the saturation range of sRGB is being used. Yes, pick your color space based on what most closely resembles the color space of your output media, but coming from a smaller color space is not necessarily disadvantageous, unless one’s image contains very strong, ultrasaturated colors.

  • Titus says:

    I own both an iMac and a PC. I use the Mac to create 4K movies in iMovie using my 4K clips from a DJI Osmo.
    When I make the movie I adjust the colors to be pleasing to my eye in iMovie, and when I display the resulting movie on the Mac with QuickTime it looks beautiful (no over saturated colors or over contrasty scenes).
    But when I play the same movie on my PC or on my Samsung 4K 65″ TV the colors are highly over saturated, and the contrast is way too high like clown vomit. I want to mention that my Dell Monitor on the PC is regularly color calibrated with a Spider, because I use it for processing my photos with Lightroom, and it does not suffer from color over saturation.
    If I use the PC to create a movie with Davinci Resolve, and play it on the PC or TV-set the colors are OK.
    When I play the same movie on the Mac it look washed out, pale, ugly…
    Can you guys tell me what is happening here between Macs and PCs? It’s driving me totally crazy. This should not be like that at all. Why movies produced on Macs and played on Macs are OK, but when played elsewhere they are over-saturated. Movies created on the PC when played on the Mac they look washed out.
    I don’t know, is this because of the gamma? I know the PCs with 2.2 and Macs 1.8.
    I thought this should not affect the exported movie. This is a non-sense.

    • Conrad Chavez says:

      This can be a difficult question to answer, because from what I’ve seen there might be more than one reason for the discrepancy. It does help to know that you keep your PC monitor calibrated.

      The reason is not a gamma difference between Macs and PCs, because in 2009, Apple switched to a default display gamma of 2.2 in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Since then, the display gamma on Macs and PCs has been the same, 2.2. But to eliminate calibration differences as a cause, both the Mac and PC displays should be calibrated to the same target color space, gamma, white point, and luminance.

      Some video players make different assumptions about color. For example, Apple QuickTime Player seems to show video differently than VLC, YouTube, etc. It might be because of color space assumptions, or assuming a video dynamic range of 0-255 vs 16-255 or 16-235, for example. That may be related to a problem that’s existed for years, which some have called the “QuickTime gamma shift.” If you search for “QuickTime gamma shift” on the web, you’ll find many discussions and no easy answers. Some find that applying a special LUT (lookup table) can help, but I don’t think iMovie can do that. I’m not sure of the exact specs of the colors that iMovie exports, but I don’t think there’s much control over it.

      I’m sorry that I don’t have a more specific answer, but I’m still trying to understand the display variations across video players and platforms myself, because they happen to me too. A couple of sample discussions are at these links:

      Gamma Shift on Export to Quicktime/Vimeo

      QuickTime gamma shift issue on exporting to MPEG-4 or QuickTime movie

      They give you an idea of what some of the issues are, but there might still be better answers elsewhere on the Web.

  • Derek says:

    Hello. Thanks for the well written and informative article. I’m still a bit on the fence in regards to what color format I should now be saving my online portfolio images. A couple of questions please:

    1) If you had a design website, would you save your Photoshop “save for web” images in “RGB” or “P3” or “srgb”? My concern is that since most people are still using devices that can only display “srgb”, my P3 images may not look very good.

    2) Are most web browsers capable of displaying “P3” and “RGB” or do they typically still display in “srgb” still?

    3) Is there a tool or app that can show how a “P3” image will look to someone who is using a monitor that can only display a “srgb” color gamut?

    4) I have a design portfolio of dozens of images saved in srgb. It will take countless hours having to re-create all of these images into the new P3 color space/gamut. Do you think this is even necessary? If so, would you wait until more people had newer devices to make the change? I guess I’ll have to make a visit to a store where I can view a P3 capable monitor and see how good/bad my website looks on it, so that I can make the decision on whether it’s worth re-doing all of my images or not.

    Sorry for so many questions. I’m a bit stressed on not knowing what workflow to take still, and whether or not I’ll have to spend countless hours re-doing all of my website’s portfolio images. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

  • Conrad Chavez says:

    Hi Derek, yes, it’s a very confusing subject. Here are some answers that I hope will help:

    1) Right now it’s still safest to export web images as sRGB with an embedded profile. The reasons are related to the following answers.

    2) It’s less about whether a web browser can display a certain gamut, and more about whether it will display non-sRGB colors as intended. That requires supporting embedded profiles and color management, so the real question is, which web browsers do that? Unfortunately, support for embedded color profiles is still uneven across browsers, especially on the devices who now do the majority of web browser, mobile. So the real answer is that sRGB is still what you want to export to for consistency across browsers and devices.

    3) You can simulate how one gamut looks on another using a proofing feature. For example, if you’re in Photoshop on a wide-gamut display, you can use the Proof Setup and Proof Colors commands to soft-proof a P3 gamut image to sRGB. For applications that don’t have a sof-proofing feature, you can use a display like a wide-gamut NEC SpectraView which can simulate, in hardware, a lower gamut such as sRGB.

    4) Because of answers 1 and 2, there is no good reason to re-create or convert images from sRGB to P3. Leave them as they are. Apple has designed things so that sRGB images still show up properly on P3 displays so that existing content doesn’t break. In the big picture, the question of what gamut to use next for web graphics is probably not about going from sRGB to P3 specifically, but about going to wide gamut in general. Because if/when we reach the point where most devices, OSs, and browsers have proper color management, then your images with embedded profiles could be saved in any wide gamut (Adobe RGB, P3, ProPhoto RGB…) and the browser would show it as well as it can within the gamut of the display. But we’re not there yet.

  • Rob Follett says:

    Hi Conrad… I am asking for your help, as I can’t find anyone on the PS Forum who will comment on my problem. First, my workflow is Adobe RGB, and I print to an Epson 3880. My current main PS computer is a 5k iMac – screen calibrated with Spyder5 Pro. With that out of the way… Here’s the issue: I can print a photo out of LR which matches the display, but PS, under the Print Settings Box, always displays a desaturated version of the photo — and the printer matches what is in the Print Settings Box, not PS proper. (same settings as LR) I don’t see this issue on my Mac Air, nor PC — and have no trouble with Color Mgt on these other devices. So… It seems as if my OSX is somehow interfering with Only PS, by converting the chosen Profile to some mishmash. But Not with LR…. Any thoughts?

  • Santiago says:

    Hola Conrad, donde podría descargarme este perfil de color

  • Sam says:

    Hi, I’m interested to buy a wide gamut display with Adobe RGB or DCI-P3, but I can’t understand if I must have a Quadro to see the color gamuts properly or just only a GTX 980 Ti or 1000 series…

  • […] and high contrast ratio, you get to see deep blacks and bright whites. With the support of P3 color, you can experience 25 percent more color than sRGB. Also, with the 500 nits brightness, the […]

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