Windows 11 Automatic color management

Oshim

Hello everyone,

As the title suggests - has anyone tried the Automatic color management feature on Win11?

On their support page MS says the following about this:

Creative professionals and enthusiasts care about fully calibrated, accurate colors because it helps to make sure colors remain consistent from the beginning to the end of their projects. Auto color management in Windows provides system-level color management to ensure that colors across Windows apps appear accurately and consistently on supported displays—whether the apps are color-managed or not.

Auto color management also helps new and updated apps render more colors with greater accuracy. This provides extra detail and fewer color artifacts (for example, in gradients, shadows, and darker scenes or pictures). With auto color management, apps can use billions of colors with 10-16 bits of precision. Even on displays that only support 8-bit color, auto color management helps to improve color quality by using different techniques, such as dithering.

To turn on auto color management

Select the Start button, then select Settings > System > Display > Color profile.

Select your display near the top, then check for the following setting: Automatically manage color for apps.

Select Automatically manage color for apps to turn it on.

Has anyone tried it? Any long-term thoughts/observations?

AgentX20

I thought the general consensus here was that Win 11 ACM is (yet more) OS dithering, so is not a good thing.
Also, it was my impression that various builds don't include those toggle buttons, but do include ACM.

floydian

Yep, ACM is another place where dithering is enabled (so making things worse), as you may even read in its description: "Even on displays that only support 8-bit color, auto color management helps to improve color quality by using different techniques, such as dithering."

Some people reported that turning it off on Windows 11 made the setup usable. In my specific case, unfortunately, anything newer than Windows 10 from June 2023 is unusable. I tried several Windows 11 builds on none of them was fine unfortunately. But please note that everyone is different.

Best Regards,

Tom

ryans

I just upgraded a personal device from Win10 to Win11 24H2 Pro. I don't see this ACM as an option for either the internal or external display.