What is wsRGB and wscRGB colour profiles?

[terrox]

What is wsRGB and wscRGB colour profiles?

and also why do they have an asterisk? does asterisk here mean requires restart or that they are the optimal choice?

[v_kyr]

Those aren't ICC specification color profiles! - wsRGB/wscRGB/e-sRGB are part of the Windows Color System (which is a framework in development and maybe presently not even fully implemented) , thus used for other purposes. - So these are not interchangeable with common standard ICC profiles!

See also:

• [APh, win7] Color Management - refresh my memory

[Print Monkey]

I'm honestly not sure why those wsRGB and wscRGB profiles are listed because they're WCS (Windows Color System) CDMP (Color Device Model Profile) profiles, not ICC profiles, and don't seem like a good idea to use normally, especially for exporting.

Apparently scRGB is a wider HDR gamut "canonical" color space used as an intermediate color space between input (such as an image file) and output (such as a SDR sRGB display or HDR wide gamut display). Some info is here, but it relates to windows previously not supporting HDR color spaces properly and implementing stuff to make them work properly and play nicely with SDR output on the same screen. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3darticles/high-dynamic-range 

I guess maybe some people might want to use the windows WCS "canonical" color space as their working space? But the problem is you can't export a file in this color space in a compatible manner, so be warned about that.

I can't find any info on what wscRGB is.

Some of the obscure terms like CDMP, CAMP, and GMMP I can only find defined in this patent application https://www.freepatentsonline.com/7667872.html

In short, it's a more elaborate version of the usual color management pipeline where there's an intermediate wide gamut floating point color space and things like standard rendering intents are replaced by rendering profiles that can define more arbitrary formulas or algorithms for transforming from one color space to another.

It would be nice if a developer who worked on this could explain what that mysterious * is all about. Also it doesn't seem like selecting wsRGB should be allowed with RGB8 (only RGB16 and RGB32).