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Mac OSX Sprites too saturated in editor and game

Pixelkauz

Member
Hello everyone! :) I'm relatively new to this community. I'm using GMS2 since about 2 months. After a quick search, I didn't find my topic covered here so far, and since I'm a beginner, I hope you bear with me being potentially not well informed.

Anyway, with out further ado, I present you my (weird) problem: Any sprite I will import in the editor will look far more saturated in the editor and game context than intended. To highlight this, I made 2 comparison screenshots of the original asset and the asset how it looks after importing it.

screen2.jpgscreen1.jpg


Am I missing something? Is there a setting I have enabled that oversaturates my sprites? My game looks like an oversaturated piece of candy :p

I'm using the most recent version of GMS2, on Mac. I'm mainly an artist, so I'm very picky about my colors, lol. :D Someone able to help me?

Thanks!
 

samspade

Member
I don't know what would cause this, but out of curiosity have you confirmed that the hex codes are different in the sprite editor to verify it's not simply a display issue? And does the color difference exist in the game when the game is running? (i.e. is it just the editor or is there a fundamental change to the actual color data on import).

Nice art by the way.
 

Pixelkauz

Member
Hey! I checked the colors, yes. They are different indeed. And it is present also in a running game, unfortunately. :(
 

Pixelkauz

Member
Actually, the image editor in GMS2 will tell me that the hex code is the same as the original color is, but the actually displayed color is different. Not sure what is going on - but in the side by side comparison the higher saturation is definitely visible...
 

Pixelkauz

Member
One more example. The left is the original image. The blue of the sky has a hex of #48d0f8. On the right (in the game) it has a hex of #00d3fd. The editor will tell me the color has a hex of #48d0f8, too. Not sure what's going on, but it seems to be a display issue of GMS2, both in the editor AND in game mode.
 

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prtksxna

Member
I was very confused when I saw this happening. Glad that I found this thread :)

I am on 2.3.7.606 on MacOS and unsure how to proceed. Will a game exported from this always have the higher saturation? Or will the Windows export from MacOS have lower saturation? How can I make sure that the colors are the same across platforms?

@Pixelkauz were you able to find a workaround?
 

Jam373

Member
Haha I've just noticed this issue too. However it took me so long to realise that I've been stockholm syndromed by the shiny new colours. I'm seriously considering colour picking the high contrast colours and replacing the original ones (which will be a pain when it comes to mathematically calculated colours for shaders and surfaces...). But then the new colours will look even more high contrast in game again and I risk being enticed by those. When will the cycle end!
 

Jam373

Member
Hm I'm actually struggling to wrap my head around this one. I feel this can't be a GMS IDE issue but instead is something annoying about mac's display colour profiles (which I understand very little).

I'm using the default "Colour LCD", and when I use Apple's Digital Colour Meter on one of my colours that is supposedly oversaturated by gms, the values are correct to the values in the IDE editor. However the desaturated .png of the sprite that supposedly shows the true colours (the ones that appear on win pc) shows incorrect colour values.

Screenshot 2022-03-24 at 21.50.08.png Screenshot 2022-03-24 at 21.52.32.png

HOWEVER... when I change "Display native values" to "Display in sRGB", the colour meter gives the correct value as shown in the IDE.

Hoping someone who is knowledgable about colour profiles can clear up what is actually happening, and how I can get windows to have the same colour as my mac.
 
@Jam373 Interesting. What color profile is your image saved in? Sounds like GMS2 is forcing/defaulting to a narrower color profile, most likely sRGB. Would explain why your colors match when you change your monitor to sRGB. I had to deal with this stuff when I worked in a wide format print lab. Had clients work in the wrong profile and then their prints would be off-color. Worth looking into.
 
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Jam373

Member
@Jam373 Interesting. What color profile is your image saved in? Sounds like GMS2 is forcing/defaulting to a narrower color profile, most likely sRGB. Would explain why your colors match when you change your monitor to sRGB. I had to deal with this stuff when I worked in a wide format print lab. Had clients work in the wrong profile and then their prints would be off-color. Worth looking into.
Okay so. The png's that gamemaker creates (I made my sprites in GMS IDE editor) say they are in RGB colour space. But from what I can gather that isn't specific enough and we need to know which RGB colour profile? So I popped the png into this site http://exif.regex.info/exif.cgi.
The site tells me of its colour encoding:

WARNING: No color-space metadata and no embedded color profile: Windows and Mac web browsers treat colors randomly.

This seems a likely cause of my issues? Though I still don't actually know what the solution would be.

Interesting thing I found after experimenting. If I change my display's colour profile to sRGB with GMS running, the png gains saturation like I want it to, but the IDE sprite editor now shows the sprite as even more saturated. This is what I'd expect, I've effectively increased my display's saturation so everything should appear more saturated.
However, if I close GMS, then change colour profile to sRGB, then reopen GMS... now the sprite editor shows the sprite as normal (the colours I prefer that were more saturated than on windows), and it matches the png. I have equivalent colours! (edit: just checked and this is the same for in-game too)

This seems close to solving the issue, though how I use this info to get these colours the same on windows I don't know. In fact I'm still confused as I would assume my windows laptop was using sRGB, so why would it appear less saturated there if sRGB is a higher saturation colour profile than my mac's default colour profile?

@stardust9000 any chance you could share your expertise?

edit: Another thing that is bothering me, I'm fairly sure I created all these sprites on windows initially, so why do the png's appear equivalent to windows in mac's default colour profile but oversaturated in sRGB? That doesn't add up to me.
 
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@Jam373 I’m glad it worked out for you. The primary reason your PC screen looks different is that color profiles are separate from the rest of your display settings and hardware. Think settings like saturation, contrast, color temperature, tint, and so on. If you will be working across multiple platforms and color consistency matters, your monitors should be calibrated to match. I don’t have a Mac anymore, so I held my phone (Apple) next to my computer screen as I calibrated it to match my phone. Probably better if you can get your Mac screen next to your PC (you have a laptop, so no problem there).

PS: First make sure the brightness levels are close to matching before doing any adjustments. Also bear in mind that differing display surfaces (ie, matte vs glossy) will make matching slightly more difficult.
 
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