Washed Material color on some smartphones

Color Management is a big topic and one that will drive developers crazy for sure.

The first thing we as developers have to realize is that color space and color management is something that is controlled by the end-user in most cases. Some phones such as iPhones embed their own color profile so their users don’t have access to too much other than the ability to have true tone or not.

As developers and creators have to know our deployment space. If this was for a trade show or limited release that is in your control then you get to pick the color space you want based on the hardware you have.

However, if this is a general public release where any device can view it then you have to select a color space that is common or a smaller subset than most typical displays. This color space is sRGB. This does not mean your customers phone, desktop monitor will be in sRGB but it means you have the best chance of your colors appearing correctly on that device which is why the web in general uses sRGB.

So in Blender under Render Properties > Color Management you have some settings to manage your color space and affect the output of your files. The first thing you will need to do though is insure your monitor color space matches your display device settings so you are seeing accurate colors. You will notice I am not saying you need it to be set to sRGB, you will have to decide what is best for you but when creating for web I make sure my monitor is in sRGB and display device is in sRGB. View Transform…. this will be task specific but when you are at final, I find it best to set to standard before output. Sequencer…leave that as sRGB.

After that… you have no control. How it looks on one device vs another is up to the individual users settings and hardware.

There are significant difference between iOS and android. iOS uses its own color spaces and converts it to their color space to work best on their devices. This can sometimes lead to shifting colors. To correct for this we test on both devices and have specific textures and colors re-assigned based on iOS or android…if an only if its a problem. In most cases unless its a logo or a brand color this is not needed.

If you are using a texture that you received or created outside of Blender then that program will assign a color space to the texture. You will want to be sure the color space is sRGB. Not Adobe, or some other color space. If you are not sure what colors space was used go back and open the file in Photoshop or Affinity Photo, whatever you use and

Your node trees do not affect the color space so as long as you are using supported nodes. Once you have all your applications, textures, and their corresponding color spaces in sRGB your output will be in the best spot to support the most comprehensive number of devices.

Here is a link to some good info on this subject:
https://www.eizo.com/library/management/web-color-management/

Here is a link to a demo: https://webgl.r66dapps.com/escapev1/
That uses lots of different textures three sample node trees shown below. Just keep in mind the node tree has nothing to do with color space as long as they are compatible nodes.

There is no explicit info about using a texture at all in the question, it is just said its a shader node.

You are right, color management is important. But maybe it is not the root of the side-effect in this case.

I was experiencing strange “washout-looking-effects” after updating some apps from 3.9.1 to 4.0.0/4.0.1 when loading the scene in Chromium, but after some more reloads, it was gone and not reproducible. I therefore ignored it and just went on…