After reading this from my good friend daniel Working with a P3 display in MacOS – Brylka – TooDee – PanicPost I was dumbfounded as I was so sure (and i was sure I tested this as well…) that “unmanaged” or colorsync unsupported apps would default to sRGB for each pixel that cant be defined.
But after trying it again on MacOS Ventura on a M1 MacBook Pro 14" with XDR screen I was able to validate his findings, which are that infact those now just skip all colormanagement alltogether, which means that any GUI element thats not colormanaged is now just diplaying its values in the native colorspace of the display used.
As all the newer macbooks, iMacs e.t.c are P3 Gamut and not sRGB gamut, unmanaged images ( this includes video, stills, gui buttons, everything) is now beign displayed “oversaturated”. This has nothing to do with quicktime tags or anything like that.
Flame can work around this but you have to use “sync with OS” and use viewer colormanagement OR use a reference mode preset on the XDR screen.
This is pretty nuts, honestly. unmanaged apps include things like VLC player… Nuke… maya… blender, houdini, default Resolve(you can toggle it) and many many many more apps
So who knows on a mac anymore if what you see is correct, its almost impossible unless you spent many months studying the in and outs of colormanagement.
This is so sad.
if you want to try for yourself here is a RGB triplet , its written by nuke so doesnt have any tags or useable metadata… its “correctly” displayed in macOS Preview, as thats interpreting it as sRGB. the point is there is a difference in saturation between apps depending on if they are correctly programmed for colorsync or not.
(you might need to download the screenshots… as they are tagged for my display and might be converted from p3 back to sRGB so you wont see any difference in the screenshot) .
Also never trust a screenshot.
