ProPhoto profile in Color Management Setup Pleiades Astrophoto PixInsight · Riccardo Civati · ... · 7 · 708 · 4

Jon Rista:

Riccardo Civati:
Hi all

can someone tell me how add the prophoto profile in this default profiles?
In the window menù it there is not.

Riccardo

Windows 11? If so, ProPhoto was removed as a built in profile. I don't know why, but the only ones that come with W11 now are Apple RGB, Adobe RGB 1998, ColorMatch RGB, sRGB IEC61966-2.1, and the Agfa: Swop Standard. Interestingly, with ProPhoto removed, none of the other more recent wider gamut profiles were added, either. I don't know why ProPhoto was removed, but it is what I used to use most of the time (I have a pretty darn wide gamut screen). I've been using AdobeRGB 1998, but that doesn't really reproduce the best color IMO. 

So, I looked around for a while, and eventually found this page:

https://sites.google.com/site/chromasoft/icmprofiles

Which contains a zip file that has a bunch of profiles (including some variants of ProPhoto, read the page to understand what they are and when to use them (i.e. the ProPhoto22 is for a gamma 2.2 screen, if that is what you have, etc.) There are other profiles in there as well...I only installed the appropriate ProPhoto profile for my system. So far this has been the only way I've found to get ProPhoto working again on Windows 11.

FWIW, there is a NOTABLE difference when using the ProPhoto profile vs. AdobeRGB or sRGB. At least on my screen, the difference is huge. With AdobeRGB, its very slightly better than sRGB, both render rather muted color (even when I'm using my screen on its widest gamut setting...it also has built in settings for sRGB and AdobeRGB for quick comparisons when doing color critical work). When ProPhoto, the richness of reds, pinks, magentas, violets, purples and blues in particular, are dramatically improved. Greens are better as well, but that usually doesn't do as much for astrophotography (does help with yellow colors, though, so stars are better.) 

Anyway, hope this helps. It should, and the results should be dramatic, if you do indeed have a wide gamut screen. (Also, I think this profile is better than the one that used to be included in Windows...while the default one in the past did improve color, the differences with this particular ProPhoto.icc profile are more significant, color is much richer, and natural contrasts are much better.)