What Is sRGB Emulation Mode And Why Is It Important?

You’ve probably seen the term sRGB emulation mode in many monitor reviews and how its implementation on certain models is either good or bad.

Some people find that a good sRGB emulation mode is a crucial feature for a monitor they’re considering, while others don’t pay much attention to it.

So, what’s the catch?

Why Do I Need sRGB Emulation Mode?

First of all, you should know that sRGB here refers to the sRGB color space, which is the most common color space used today.

Most web content and SDR (Standard Dynamic Range, that is, non-HDR) games and videos are developed with the sRGB color space in mind.

So, on a monitor with 100% sRGB color space coverage (and decent calibration), sRGB content will appear accurate, just as the creators intended.

However, if a monitor has a wider color gamut – for instance, if it covers 100% of the much larger Adobe RGB color space, its colors extend beyond the sRGB color space, resulting in a color gamut size equivalent to ~150% sRGB.

In this case, the monitor stretches its color primaries to match its native gamut thus causing over-saturation when viewing sRGB content. So, instead of the standard red color for YouTube’s logo, for instance, it appears too red or even neon-like.

An ICC profile allows color-managed applications to modify and properly map the gamut for accurate color reproduction.

Sadly, most applications (excluding apps for color-critical work, such as Photoshop) aren’t color-managed. Further, finding an ICC profile for your monitor may not always be easy or possible.

This is where sRGB emulation mode comes in.

What Does sRGB Emulation Mode Do?

If your wide color gamut monitor has an sRGB mode, you will usually be able to find it among other picture presets or color temperature modes.

Even some standard gamut monitors have an sRGB mode, which is usually the most color-accurate (factory-calibrated) picture preset.

The sRGB mode simply clamps the monitor’s native gamut down to ~100% sRGB, providing you with accurate sRGB colors.

Just how accurate the colors are will depend on the monitor’s factory calibration. It’s also important that the sRGB mode is flexible in terms of available picture settings.

A lot of wide color gamut monitors have an sRGB mode with decent accuracy but have the brightness option locked to a very high or very low setting. This usually makes the sRGB mode useless – it doesn’t matter that the colors are accurate if the screen is too bright or too dim to work with.

On some monitors with sRGB mode and locked brightness, it’s possible to circumvent the issue by entering the service menu and adjusting the brightness there – or via a third-party app, such as ControlMyMonitor. These methods won’t work on every monitor, but they’re worth trying as they’re not complicated.

Another important setting that is often locked in the sRGB mode is color temperature. If the monitor’s sRGB mode has a color temperature of 8000K out of the box, for instance, locked color channel settings make it impossible to fix this, resulting in a cold/bluish whitepoint instead of the usual 6500K target.

So, if you’re looking for a wide color gamut monitor and you want to do some color-critical work with sRGB color space, but you don’t have a colorimeter, make sure the sRGB mode of that monitor has adjustable brightness and decent factory calibration with low Delta E (at least below 3, the lower the better).

Alternatives To Monitor’s sRGB Mode

If your monitor doesn’t have an sRGB mode or it’s not accurate enough, there are ways to clamp the gamut on the software side. These include Windows 11 Auto Color Management feature, AMD Radeon Custom Color driver settings and some third-party tools, such as novideo_srgb and dwm_lut.

If you have an AMD graphics card, you can enable the sRGB emulation mode by changing the ‘Custom Color’ to ‘Enabled’ and ‘Color Temperature Control’ to ‘Disabled’ in the Radeon GPU drivers.

Even if your monitor has an sRGB mode, you should try this method too since it may provide better results. However, don’t use both the sRGB mode on your monitor and the AMD option simultaneously.

If you have a colorimeter, you’ll need to calibrate and profile the monitor again after adjusting these settings for the best results.

NVIDIA doesn’t offer this option, but a user at GitHub, ledoge, managed to make it work via a simple-to-use tool called novideo_srgb. It even allows clamping to other color spaces, such as DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB.

Now:

Some monitors have wrong EDID primaries. In this case, if you were to use any of these options (AMD clamp, novideo_srgb or Windows 11 ACM), the color gamut won’t be properly clamped – it will either be reduced too much (for instance down to 84% instead of ~100%) or not enough (for an example, to 115% down from 135%).

Further, on some monitors, these software clamps can have different results when using DisplayPort and HDMI.

Another issue is that you won’t be able to tell by eye just how accurate the image is. You’ll definitely notice a drop in color saturation, but you’ll need a colorimeter to know the exact color gamut.

Here’s what you can do.

If you have an NVIDIA card, the novideo_srgb tool actually allows you to load the correct EDID primaries from an ICC profile if you can find one for your particular monitor model, which will fix the above-mentioned issue.

You can even use ICC profiles created by other users, but in this case, make sure that the ‘Calibrate gamma to’ box is unticked as it will transfer gamma corrections from that ICC profile that may not improve accuracy on your particular unit.

If you have a colorimeter and have created your own ICC profile, then enable the ‘Calibrate gamma to’ option to load the gamma corrections as well.

When using these methods to clamp the gamut, you should use the default sRGB IEC61966-2.1 ICC profile instead of the one you downloaded/created.

Sadly, novideo_srgb only works with NVIDIA cards. Another method is explained below if you have an AMD or Intel graphics card.

3D LUT

There’s another very useful third-party cool called dwm_lut. It allows you to apply a 3D LUT to the entire Windows desktop, thus clamping the color gamut to the selected color space using ICC profiles.

The downside is that some users report a (~5%) performance hit in games and not being able to use NVIDIA G-SYNC at the same time as this tool.

To set this up, download and install DisplayCAL. In the installed folder, you’ll find the DisplayCAL-3DLUT-maker.exe file (image above). For the ‘Source profile’, select the desired color space (for instance, sRGB), and for the ‘Destination profile’, select your ICC profile. ‘3D LUT file format’ should be .cube.

If you have a colorimeter and have created your own profile, make sure that the ‘Apply calibration (vcgt)’ box is ticked to gain gamma corrections. In case you are using an ICC profile by another user, you should untick that box due to panel variance (gamma corrections for one unit of a monitor model may not be beneficial on another unit).

Next, click ‘Create 3D LUT’, and after the .cube file is created, you can add it to the DWM LUT GUI application. Then, simply click ‘Apply’ to clamp the gamut or ‘Disable’ to revert the changes.

When using this method, you should use the default sRGB ICC profile (not the calibrated one) since the 3D LUT contains all corrections, so you might also want to disable the DisplayCAL Profile Loader in case you’re using it (and choose sRGB IEC61966-2.1 as default).

Conclusion

In case you have a wide color gamut monitor with around 90 to 95% DCI-P3 gamut coverage (~125% sRGB gamut size), an sRGB emulation mode is arguably not necessary for everyday use because the colors aren’t too over-saturated. You get a bit of extra color vibrancy that’s not too intrusive.

On monitors with wider color gamuts, such as 98% DCI-P3 (~135% sRGB) or 100% Adobe RGB gamut coverage, an sRGB mode is necessary as there’s too much over-saturation. People’s skin tones in YouTube videos will appear as if sunburnt, for instance.

For professional color-critical use, you’ll need a colorimeter anyway, so you won’t have any issues in color-managed applications.

If you need an entry-level display and don’t want to get a colorimeter, we recommend getting a monitor with good factory calibration; you can find the best models in our dedicated best photo/video editing monitor buyer’s guide.

Thanks to the third-party tools mentioned in the article, if you can find an ICC profile for your monitor, you won’t need to rely on monitors’ sRGB emulation modes.