Washed out colors on IOS

[mitralone]

Hello all,

I am experiencing a strange problem. My graphics seem to lose color info when transferred to ipad. I even tried transferring my atlas image directly and the problem exists. Its like you have decreased the saturation on all textures. Everything seems perfect in unity but on ipad, images are crystal clear but with bad color.

I have read that IOS devices do not manage color profiles in images so is there a way to overcome this? I want my graphics to look as I have them in PS.

Thanks

[unikronsoftware]

No idea. I can't say I've seen any washed out colours on iOS.

However.... do you have any overrides set to make the textures 16 bit on iOS? We found out recently that Unity 4.3 "conveniently" sets this up on all textures imported when in 2d mode. Is this whats causing it?

[mitralone]

Well I have already checked off all IOS overrides and everything is in truecolor.

To check one more time, I simply sent my atlas file to the device with dropbox and the same problem exists there as well. I did the same thing with other images and same issue is there. When I take a screenshot from my game and then I transfer that image to my computer, everything looks as it should. Very strange.

You can do the same test. Just take a screenshot from any game or simply transfer an image from your computer to ipad and then look at both pictures on both devices. I tested this with an ipad2 and an ipad mini(non retina) and both had the same results. Images are non unity generated(simple background I found on internet for ipad). I am attaching the bg for you to test out.

I just tested on a 5th generation Ipod and it seems it is not effected. So far Iphone 4, ipad mini and ipad 2 seems to be effected.

[unikronsoftware]

It looks pretty much spot on to me on an iPhone5 vs Retina mbp internal display.  If the images look different on the device then there isn't really a great deal you can do to get exactly the same colours. AFAIK you don't get access to the display colour curves in Unity.

I can't say I've ever seen such a great difference that I'd be concerned about it on any iOS device. I have seen far more variation with android devices with over saturated colors / black crushing, etc.

[Majicpanda]

This sounds like it could be a shader problem? Are you using tk2d's shader or did you change it by chance?  I fought Android and iOS quite a bit with shaders when I built to them because I was trying to do some fancy stuff.. I went back to tk2dBlendToVertex? i think it's called and issues went away.

[mitralone]

Well I am using tk2d shaders but the issue is not limited to Unity. I see it in all apps, games.

Just try to upload the image I posted to you ipad 2 or iphone 4s or lower. Then compare the image to the way it looks on your computer. The problem is more obvious on purple shades. I tested with games of Disney etc as well. Same result.

Also check this very interesting article.

http://regex.info/blog/2012-03-27/1964

Do not forget to read this both on your computer and your ios device.

[unikronsoftware]

Unity outputs raw values to the back buffer. That bypasses any colour management, not that there is any on iOS. If you want to you can find out the correct colour profile to work with in PS, but you'll probably have to work with 16 bit source assets and build your own asset pipeline for this. Simply applying a gamma curve in post (its not possible in Unity afaik) will give you correct colours but will probably reduce the colour range and introduce banding.

p.s. Image color management doesn't really have very much to do with this.