Right, so sRGB should really just be the only allowed profile for images. That's my whole argument. There should be some standard profile all images should use, and then displays should deal with the work of converting things to a suitable display profile. Allowing more than one image-level profile just makes things way more complex for no perceivable benefit.

>That means it will look exactly the same on both displays. If they both have a correct display profile

We can continue believing that Santa exists, or we can accept that effectively nobody has correct color profiles, and doesn't care either.

It's nice metadata you have there, would be a shame if I applied night mode to it at 6PM.

> also, you can actually calibrate consumer hardware

...with professional hardware that costs more than the one you have at hand.

Again, pretty much everyone will just tweak their monitor/printer settings until they get results that look OK.

>display and print will look exactly the same

Until you turn off the lights. Or until you turn on the lights (what color temperature is you light?). Or until the wind blows, moving that cloud over the sun, changing light temperature.

Or — wait for it — actually, that's all, while you've been waiting the sun has set.

The point being, all we can shoot for is FF0000 being what would be "red" for most, 00FF00 being "green", and 0000FF being "blue" — and then accept the "fade" of the digital image from one screen to another as a fact of life.

So, learn how to stop worrying and love unspecified RGB colorpsaces. Magenta only exists in your brain anyway [1]

Side note: did you ever think about how your recorded music isn't adjusted for the frequency response of the loudspeakers, and half the people will listen to it with the "BASS MEGABOOST" feature on anyway?

That's why the art of mastering exists. It's accepting the reality, and putting work into making it work with uncalibrated, crappy hardware — as well as hi-fi gear.

PS: have fun calibrating your vision to make sure that you don't see green where I see red

[1]https://medium.com/swlh/magenta-the-color-that-doesnt-exist-...

As you mention, our brain adapts pretty easily to varying lighting conditions in the real world, and that could also work on a screen[1], but the ambiant context is what matters: if you look at an image “A” in your said “undefined color space” after having spent quite some times looking at sRGB images for a while, then your image “A” would look absolutely horrible until your brain starts to adapt, like when you put sunglasses on or off for instance. The big difference being: with sunglasses, we have no choice but wait for our brain to adapt, but on a computer all the user would do is close the image.

[1]: even though for some reason I don't know, it works much less well: if you try and take pictures with the wrong white balance setting, the picture will look like shit no matter how long you look at it.

As a side note,

> [1]https://medium.com/swlh/magenta-the-color-that-doesnt-exist-...

This article is pretty terrible, as her author mixes everything up.

You can get pretty close without expensive calibration gear, using consumer gear that has a reasonable factory sRGB calibration.

https://blog.kaetemi.be/2021/02/01/calibrating-an-inkjet-pri...