How to get the color profile that the display is using?

Question

I want to make a color looks consistent across different environment. I wonder if there is a way to know the color profile the system or the display is currently using, so that I can convert the color into the right color space for the system to render.

Thank Brendan for explaining solutions on Windows. But does anyone have any ideas what it is like on Mac?

Answer 1

I wonder if there is a way to know the color profile the system or the display is currently using, so that I can convert the color into the right color space for the system to render.

There's a way (e.g. the IDXGIOutput6::GetDesc1 method - see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/dxgi1_6/nf-dxgi1_6-idxgioutput6-getdesc1 ).

Unfortunately this isn't very convenient. The raw information doesn't seem to include any information for gamma; and the maths needed to convert the raw information (RedPrimary, GreenPrimary, BluePrimary, WhitePoint) into a color conversion matrix is difficult to find.

To make it worse; it can't work when the same graphics/window is stretched across multiple monitors with different color profiles; can break when the end user reconfigures monitor settings (as this isn't reflected in the values Windows gets from the monitor), and monitors can change over time. These things put the burden on the end user (making sure all monitors match, doing monitor calibration regularly to achieve accurate colors, etc) and most users (excluding professional graphics designers) don't do this.

Note: Ideally; an OS would provide a standard wide gamut linear color space (e.g. maybe CIE XYZ) and do the color space conversion for all software (e.g. using GPU in the background, for each monitor separately); but Window's APIs are old (and it would've been expensive in the 1990s) and backward compatibility makes it hard to retrofit something like that, so they mostly just adopted "assumed sRGB even if it's wrong" and tacked on an awful mess for software developers who need accurate colors.

Answer 2

Since you are asking about Windows color properties, the Monitor Configuration Functions part of the Win API is available and can be used to get(and set) color attributes. Here are just a few examples:

• GetMonitorColorTemperature
• GetMonitorRedGreenOrBlueDrive
• GetMonitorRedGreenOrBlueGain
• GetMonitorBrightness

The components specific to each function needed to build and run your application are listed in each link. eg.

highlevelmonitorconfigurationapi.h
Dxva2.lib
Dxva2.dll