Well, I’ve read a lot about this and the one thing I keep reading is that there’s no conlusive answer from DXO. So, I really have to ask here (like others).
I plan to buy a € 2000,- EIZO cg279x wide gamut screen. Photolab is (by far), my favorite raw converter and I don’t really want to go back to Lightroom/Adobe. Still I might have to…because I still don’t know what the “native” / “working” colorspace of Photolab is. I don’t mean export possibilities, but all that goes before export. Can I work in Adobe RGB? ProPhoto maybe?
I would love 100% clear answers.
Thank you very much!
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something like this?
Finally, in terms of color space, PhotoLab proposes 4 options:
- sRGB
- AdobeRGB
- Original (which turns out that it is sRGB or AdobeRGB depending on the camera setting)
- Custom (you can select an icc color profile)
Yes.
If you have a screen calibrated to AdobeRGB, go to
Edit—> Preferences ----> Display ----> Common
and change the ICC profile used for the display. AdobeRGB, genericRGB and “Current profile of the display device” are the options
It appears that for PL2, it automatically uses the colour profile of the display regardless (mine is set to sRGB as that is what the Print Company I send photos to uses).
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Thank you Peter. Exactly…something like that😊
Thank you tilltheendofeternity! Clear answer.
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These settings are about proper colour-management, i.e. they allow PhotoLab to generate a colour-managed preview. The preview translates the raw data interpreted by the internal colour space, the development settings and the monitor profile. Out of the three the user can control the last two parameters in PhotoLab. I believe the question in the OP concerns two issues: the internal colour space and the monitor profile.
So yes, if you calibrate and profile your monitor, PhotoLab allows you to use the correct monitor profile. I use a wide-gamut Eizo with PhotoLab with no issues (setting it to “Current profile of the display device”, and making sure my system has the correct monitor profile loaded). I profile my monitor to its native gamut, rather than limiting it to sRGB or Adobe RGB, because I use colour-managed programs to process and view my photos in.
But PhotoLab doesn’t let you control the working colourspace and I think the OP would like to know what space is used to calculate the raw data before export. I’d add a question of my own: what is the precision of the calculations? 16-bit, 32-bit? Integer, float? I think only somebody from the programmers can answer these types of questions. So, @sgospodarenko, could you forward those questions to somebody qualified to give the answer?
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Good questions sankos. I would like to read possible answers as well. I don’t have any experiences with a wide gamut monitor yet. In what way is the “native gamut” of your Eizo, different to one of the known colour spaces (like aRGB)? What (correct) monitor profile do you load? Maybe stupid questions, but I like to learn.
Here’s a gamut plot of my monitor (the coloured outline) compared to Adobe RGB (the dotted grey outline):
This is a 2D representation, so it doesn’t show you the full picture, but descriptively my monitor covers 97.9% of sRGB and 97.3% of Adobe RGB. However, its full gamut volume is 148% of sRGB and 102 of Adobe RGB, so it exceeds both colour spaces in some hues (yellows/reds), but it doesn’t contain them entirely (magentas/blues). That’s why it’s not optimal to profile my monitor to either sRGB or Adobe RGB but rather to its native gamut. This is the profile which is picked up by all colour-managed applications.
Thank you again sankos. Is it true, that a gamut plot like that can be produced on a (any Eizo) wide gamut monitor? If so, how different can it be between monitors…or between different Eizo monitors (especially those in the cg line)? As I said before, I’ll certainly wait for the cg279x.
Is it possible to actually see / notice the colour “differences”/ “representations” outside aRGB?
The gamut plot from the screenshot was made in the profiling software I use – DisplayCAL (you can use it for any type of monitor). My Eizo is a couple of years old now and it’s an “economy” class type of monitor. The CG monitor will certainly have a wider gamut coverage and internal LUT with 16-bit (!) processing, much better for the deepest, neutral blacks, without banding or colour casts.
Depending on what your current monitor’s gamut is you should be able to notice more nuanced and richer hues in the yellow/red and green/blue spectrum when working in wide gamut colour spaces like Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB (see the comparison with the sRGB plot which the “regular” monitor might be close to):
That’s significant for landscapes, seascapes and portraiture, and for richly saturated subjects such as flowers or human-made objects.
The fact that many current monitors are able to exceed Adobe RGB makes a good case for raw converters which work internally with something as large as ProPhoto RGB. When you plot the gamuts of good printers they also go beyond Adobe RGB in certain hues (though their gamut volume is not as large as that of an emissive device such as a wide-gamut monitor).
At the moment I am working on an iMac (end 2013)/ i7/27"/32 Gb/3 Tb fusion drive. I’ve been thinking about a new iMac (newer models probably will come in 2019). Even about a iMac Pro. But still…no wide gamut monitor and for 90% I’m using my computer time for photography (processing/working on files/using DxO PhotoLab and Affinity Photo…no Adobe anymore, etc.) I doubt a 5k iMac can bring my photography to a next level. Superb screen…very clear/very nice/etc…but do I need a 4k or even 5k monitor? That’s what I’m asking myself…and the more times I ask myself, the more times, my answer is “no”. I do not do any video/no gaming…beside photography only surfing/mailing/etc. Simple things.
I don’t know the profiling software you’re using, but I presume the ColorNavigator in some Eizo’s (like the cg279x), will do this job (?).
Some people tell me it’s a complete nonsense to work on a wide gamut screen (or even a calibrated screen); they say, that by far most computers are not calibrated and only sRGB anyway. I don’t understand this. My way of thinking is, that most computers are not showing images the same anyway, so why not start with a proper calibrated wide gamut and produce a kind of “master” image. Without a wide gamut screen, I will never be able to see the proper/better colours / colour tones and nuances. I can always turn it into sRGB when I want to (like web); the other way around seems a lot harder (impossible with sRGB monitors; I would then work in the blind).
I have to think…more again 
I shoot portraits most of the time.
I agree, that it would be great to have a raw converter that works with aRGB or even ProPhoto RGB.
For me photography is a hobby so I’d be satisfied even with the CS line of Eizo monitors. The CG line is especially good for pros who work in teams, where colour-critical agreement between users is crucial for projects such as colour-grading a movie (that’s the usage scenario drawn in the product description of the monitor you’re looking at). 4K/5K screens would mean having to upgrade my current PC, which I don’t need.
Well, I wouldn’t say that going from a regular gamut monitor to a wide gamut monitor has brought my photography to the next level. It certainly forced me to revise certain assumptions I had about colour management and certain types of software. Being able to see richer greens, aquas and blues when editing in ProPhoto RGB is nice when using such sliders as Vibrancy/Saturation or the HSL module, even if most of my photos end up in web-oriented sRGB. If I wanted to print a landscape photo and edited it using a regular gamut monitor, I’d be forced to rely on soft-proofing gamut warnings to a much greater extent than when using a wide-gamut monitor (unfortunately PhotoLab2 doesn’t have soft-proofing).
You can try the free DisplayCal with your current monitor if you have profiling hardware (i1 or Spyder, etc.). I haven’t used the ColorNavigator software so I don’t know if you can plot the gamuts over there, but if you need it, you can always use DisplayCal for that (feeding it with the profile made in ColorNavigator).
Most raw converters I have used do their processing in ProPhoto RGB or Lab. It’d be much better for the final conversion if DxO PhotoLab used a working space larger than Adobe RGB. Gamut compression is easier than gamut expansion, so bigger is better in this instance.
I’ve read about the cg279x for colour grading movies. It could be that this is the reason for the different colour space presets for movies. Maybe exactly that aspect makes this screen extra suitable for this. I don’t do anything with film/video/movies, so this is useless for me and this screen could be overkill. At the same time, I think it’s also a perfect monitor for photography, as it doesn’t skimp on possibilities there (on the contrary I would say). I wonder how HDR support (as I read in specs), could affect my photography.
English is not my native language, so excuse me, if I do not express myself in the right way.
“…I’d add a question of my own: what is the precision of the calculations? 16-bit, 32-bit? Integer, float? I think only somebody from the programmers can answer these types of questions. So, @sgospodarenko, could you forward those questions to somebody qualified to give the answer?..”
I posted this question on another forum.
Someone said:
“…So, I’m a programmer, and I’ve written my own software to do all this, but my response is generic, as I’m not a DxO or Adobe programmer. First, floating point representation internally is good, but not especially germane to this discussion. Same with 32-bit integers. It’s the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit that’s most significant to preserving both tone and color gradations…”
I hope, this is what you mean?
He also said:
“…Now, the color spaces really don’t care about such, and contrary to popular assumption, sRGB is not tied to 8-bit integer representation. But, converting early to sRGB is a different kind of clipping, one that discards color gradations in extreme colors, even if done to 16-bit data. If your images don’t have things like extreme blues from theatrical lights (my current nemesis), you’ll probably not notice because the “mainstream” colors will trot from working to output colorspace unmodified. But the cobalt-blue accent lights in my local theater gave me garish posterization when a considered mapping from camera->working color space was not done, even before the further compression into output color…”
Thanks, I’ve seen that post in your DPR Retouching forum thread, where I also tried to answer some of your questions.
Your original question still remains unanswered until one of the developers chimes in: what is the working colourspace in PhotoLab?
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That’s right Sankos…my original question still remains unanswered. I wonder why??
In DPR forum you mention FranciscoDiSilvestro on yet another forum. He mentions a reaction from DXO, that says: “DxO Optics Pro uses Adobe RGB as its internal working color space”. He (FransicoDiSilvestro) also states: “If you render raw images to tiff or jpeg they will be AdobeRGB limited, even if you specify ProPhotoRGB”
That leaves either working in AdobeRGB and be sattisfied (also export maybe as Jpeg or tiff in aRGB), or (as you said in DPR forum): Export as linear DNG’s to Affinity Photo. I wonder how extensive this colour editing then would have to be. I would love to stay in Photolab as much a possible .
Thank you!
A quick guess might be that using Adobe RGB covers a larger colour space than sRGB and so is a halfway between those needing proRGB / CMYK and the rest of us who don’t?
I have not really had any issues working in PL2 and then moving to Luminar and Affinity where I use sRGB (which is what my monitor uses and is calibrated for. The professional printers I use also want images sent as sRGB too). I usually send them from PL2 through to other software as .dng or tiff files
Thank you tilltheendofeternity. If using sRGB I guess that’s not a problem indeed. I was thinking about larger(er) colorspaces (aRGB and larger…also exporting into another program).
Your photography will improve ONLY through what you WANT and DO. The main influencer is your own brain 
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Correct Platypus. Gear can expand my possibilities…but only if I want to:-)