1
$\begingroup$

I hope this is the correct place to ask this question. It feels to me that I should ask people who have had to program graphics as there’s a lot of confusion about color depth in general.

I’m sure a lot of people are aware that Adobe Photoshop can render OpenGL to 10bpc/30bit displays as long as the graphics card, divers and monitor support it.

My question is, now that we have monitors that can display HDR, are these HDR monitors also capable of doing rendering in Photoshop 10-bit?

$\endgroup$
1
  • $\begingroup$ Even though it is a hardware question I think it is still okay to ask here. $\endgroup$
    – wychmaster
    Dec 18, 2020 at 23:15

1 Answer 1

3
$\begingroup$

Maybe. HDR monitors are typically going to be some approximation of the DCI-P3 color space, while Adobe's wide-color rendering is the Adobe RGB color space. The two are similar but not quite the same; in particular, Adobe RGB extends a bit further into the green-cyan range than DCI-P3 does:

Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 on CIE chromaticity diagram

That said, these are only idealized color spaces, and the gamut of a given actual monitor is going to differ somewhat from these. That's why you'll see monitors advertised as having "99% Adobe RGB coverage" or "99% DCI-P3" or some such.

So, a typical HDR monitor can probably reproduce most of the Adobe space but maybe not quite all of it, but in practice it might be just about as good as an actual Adobe-supporting monitor.

That said, I don't know whether Photoshop and the drivers/OS/etc will actually cooperate to let you turn on Adobe RGB rendering on a DCI-P3 HDR monitor. If Photoshop is outputting 10-bit color in Adobe RGB space, but the monitor doesn't actually take that format, then it would need to be converted somewhere along the line to a color space and encoding that the monitor can take as input. That can certainly be done by the graphics card/drivers/OS, but I don't know whether the support for doing such conversions is actually there.

$\endgroup$
1
  • $\begingroup$ Well this is embarrassing! I managed to completely forget that I asked this question. Thank you very much for the detailed reply Nathan. Unfortunately I think my description was poor, sorry. What I meant was that I currently have a monitor and card that can display in 10 bit per channel using OpenGL (what photoshop uses). If I replace my current monitor with one that says it does Windows HDR (for example an Asus ProArt monitor) does that also mean that it can do OpenGL 10 bpc too? $\endgroup$
    – Phaethon
    Jul 23, 2021 at 18:47

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge that you have read and understand our privacy policy and code of conduct.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.