Color Management Tab

The "Color Management" tab lets you define the directory where ICC profiles can be found. You should also define the ICC profile of your monitor when you've done a calibration. If you don't do it, the image will be displayed with wrong colors.

The option "Automatically use operation system's main monitor profile" is currently only supported on Windows, and it support only one monitor. If you have multiple monitors connected, it will always take the main monitor's profile (the one with the task bar).

On Mac OS X all displayed colors will be in sRGB space, and then, if necessary, converted by the native OS X color pipeline to match the screen calibration, if any. This means that you cannot choose a monitor color profile on OS X. Colors will be displayed correctly, even over multiple screens, but if you have a wide-gamut screen RawTherapee's displayed colors will still be limited to sRGB. This will however not affect output, i.e. you can still produce images with colors outside the sRGB space.

The Linux version does not support monitor profile auto-detection, but as long as you load the same ICC profile as used in calibration the colors will be managed and you will get full use of your wide gamut monitor, if you have one. If you have more than one monitor with different profiles you will have to choose a primary one for correct color and have the RawTherapee window there.

Rendering Intent
The "Rendering intent" drop-down lets you choose how the ICC profiles are used for translation between gamuts or color spaces.
 * Perceptual
 * If the color gamut of your image is higher than that of your destination device (monitor or printer) then it is compressed a bit to fit the gamut of your device as far as possible. This might result in an image with reduced saturation, but the hue is still kept. It might look a bit dull. But this is not really that much visible as the color relations stay the same. This method is activated by default (recommended).


 * Relative Colorimetric
 * The colors existing in the color gamuts of both your image and your device are kept and displayed 100% perfect. If the color does not exist within the color gamut of your device the nearest possible value is taken. This might lead to some banding effects, especially visible in blue sky. The white point will be corrected.


 * Saturation
 * Very similar to Perceptual, but here it is tried to keep the saturation and change the hue instead. This is very useful for e.g. screenshots or similar. It could also be used when you do not care about a possible color shift as long the image does not look dull.


 * Absolute Colorimetric
 * Similar to relative colorimetric. It tries to reproduce the exact colors recorded in the original scene. The white point will not be corrected. It is normally used, when the gamuts of your image and your device are nearly the same. Used when exact reproduction of specific colors is needed, e.g. fabric or logo colors.

colors is needed, e.g. fabric or logo colors.