So, my background is in digital visual effects and animation production for motion pictures, and I have experience with designing and implementing end-to-end color processes across entire studios.
As multiple people here have pointed out, calibrating your monitor, meaning adjusting its settings to match some standard, has to be one element of an end-to-end process to achieve anything useful.
There are a whole lot of color transformations that happen between capturing your image and putting it on paper, on film, or on a viewer’s screen.
- Your camera translates a real-world intensity and combination of many wavelengths into spatial and color information that’s stored in the raw file that necessarily throws away a ton of information.
- Your raw file usually contains information from the camera that defines how its data is to be mapped to some kind of display-friendly standard, and your image editing or conversion software (often Photoshop or Lightroom) reads and applies this.
- The photo editing software converts that raw image into a color space that it uses for its own internal representation.
- When it’s displayed on the screen, another transformation occurs from the internal color space of the photo editing software to the output encoding space. (note: monitor calibration can, but doesn’t always, result in generation of a profile that can control this step.)
- Your monitor takes images in the output color space and converts that to light intensity (note: adjusting this is a major purpose of monitor calibration.)
- Your photo editing color space also has similar transformations to the color encoding of your output device, if you are printing your images to paper or film.
- Finally, the output device itself has a transformation from its encoded space to the actual colors that end up on paper or film.
If you’re not controlling (or at least using consistent settings for) these steps, you’re essentially in an uncalibrated environment, where the steps you don’t control can do just about anything.
Photoshop’s controls for managing this process are on the View -> Proof Setup submenu, and exactly how to approach it and how to use those controls is way beyond what i can give you in a Reddit post.
But, if you’re in an uncalibrated environment and want results that seem pretty much like you’re used to, you probably can calibrate your monitor to sRGB, set any monitor settings to sRGB (this is at least possible on the PD2500Q) and set your proof setup settings in Photoshop to “internet standard RGB (sRGB)” Yes, there are other ways to do things, but if you’re hitting only a couple of steps on the above chain, you’re likely to get results that range from slightly odd to very much not what you want.
Thank you for your insight! Since sRGB is a standard that incorporates a D65 white point and 2.2 gamma, it sounds like your main concern is that calibration not try to apply a hardware LUT to get the gamut to match?