There is a reasonably good solution but I need to rant about this first:

Colour management is all about making an image appear identical across all monitors. In windows this is done via ICC profiles. This ICC profile can be inbuilt, or you can create a brand new one using a colorimeter which will then map out the exact colour capabilities of your monitor.

The reason this is done is most monitors have differing backlights and colour filters and so the colours that are displayed at the default settings vary considerably between different monitors. In the case of a game like the Witcher, the display colour is going to vary depending on your display; perhaps have a bit of a green tint, or a blue tint.

Creating a ICC colour profile, allows you to map out the characteristics of your display and so create a colour space which details the entire colour range (as long as you have a colour meter). This is very useful since colours consist of 3 colour channels RGB (Red, Green, Blue) which have 256 shades each.

Now there are several industry standard colourspaces out there (sRGB, AdobeRGB are pretty well known). When you have mapped out your display colour range, if you were to open an image that was encoded in sRGB, it would look at your custom colour profile and then remap the colour to the correct place within your monitors colour space.

For example, lets say that you have a monitor which has a colour space that is slightly larger than sRGB. This just means that the RGB channels have stronger colours than what sRGB requires. So when we select the brightest Red which corresponds to shade 256, we find that the colour is 'redder' than required; so if we open up an image encoded in sRGB, it looks at the custom monitor colour space and goes "Oh, I see, I need to choose a Red colour level of 245 to get the correct colour I need.

This is then done for all other channels so that when you look at that image, it appears identical on your display, despite the fact that your display may have stronger colours. This is where you start hearing about 6-bit, 8-bit and 10-bit displays. When you map the colour range to a lower set of numbers, you are effectively cutting out the additional shades above those selected values.

With 6-bit and 8-bit monitors (64 and 256 shades per colour), you end up with larger steps between the colours since colour 245 now becomes shade 256 for the sRGB image. Since there are 245 shades that must be mapped to 256 shades we get banding as obviously certain colours will need to be duplicated (for example shade 21 gets mapped to shade 19 and shade 20 also might get mapped to shade 19, since it is still closer to the correct colour then shade 18).

With a 10-bit display, we have a much finer granuality between colours (1024), so we reduce the banding when we map the colours to the sRGB space.

This process when done correctly allows the textures within a game like the witcher 3 to appear EXACTLY as the artists created them. Which I think would be ideal, but it doesn't often happen.

Now for most people, they aren't going to have any advantage to having the game be colour aware, because most people don't callibrate their display. But why does the Witcher 3 ACTIVELY IGNORE YOUR COLOUR PROFILE, it makes me angry >:(

Don't allow a game to change the gamma curve. The game has no idea what monitor I use, so overriding it will ALWAYS be incorrect.

My game in true fullscreen mode has a pinkish tinge to it that looks terrible (I have a wide gamut display, which brings it's own problems to the table, but it is callibrated correctly).

Now the solution is "Borderless Window", that will allow the game to utilize my carefully callibrated colour profile, but I lose vsync. It is a compromise that I prefer not to make, as I do notice the stuttering and horizontal lines occasionally due to the lack of vsync.

DEVELOPERS NEVER EVER CHANGE THE GAMMA SETTINGS IN YOUR GAME, create brightness and contrast controls, but please don't touch the gamma curves. If your artists callibrated their monitors, wouldn't it be better if those with properly calibrated monitors could enjoy seeing the game exactly as those that created it do?

99.999999999% of games ignore color management. i, too, have wasted much time and angst on this seemingly small issue.

i suggest "CPKeeper" if you have not already tried it. it worked for me.

Interesting, so CPKeeper works?

I'm using Color sustainer 1.05 which is fairly good (but does not cover all games, however it uses a higher bit rate gamma table than the built in windows one, which reduces banding) and then I use color clutch for some others (for example Divinity original sin which isn't affected by color sustainer).

I wouldn't say the % games that ignore colour management isn't that high. For example Bioshock Infinite supports colour management and so does Trine 2 without resorting to other programs to force it, but the % is quite a bit lower than it should be.

It is something that really needs to be addressed in games and made much higher priority. I'd love to see games in the future that allow you to choose the colourspace ingame, so that you may take advantage of the larger colour range that your monitor can provide.

CPkeeper does not work, I just tried it. I'm quite annoyed by this problem at all as it plagues almost all games. My colors are completely messed up the gamma is off, as it just outright ignores my calibration.

and the main issue with borderless windowed mode is its CHOPPY, it is no where near as smooth as exclusive fullscreen.

I dont know why people dont mention this, but I notice if i get 60 FPS in borderless windowed mode it is choppy however in full screen it is silky smooth at same fps.

is this the first time you've tried to use cpkeeper or have you gotten working with other games before? i remember it took a lot of dicking around for me to get it to work the first time.

CPKeeper has worked for me for many games, but it has no effect on the witcher 3 full screen.

Unfortunately there is more bad news as I have now confirmed colour clutch does not work in fullscreen mode either.

*Sigh* so we have a choice between stuttery/tearing performance (In fullscreen windowed mode) or terrible colours in fullscreen mode.

It is really bad practice to alter the gamma curves, since those same gamma curves are used to callibrate your monitor. The game is simply resetting all the individual callibrated RGB colour channels to default and using it as a glorified brightness control, your colour callibration be damned; which is especially painful on Wide colour gamut displays like my ASUS PA246Q.

Standard gamut monitors don't really suffer so much since I think most games are developed with the sRGB colour space in mind and so there is a much smaller deviation from the normal colour space (even when callibrated, the changes are usually small, so even discarding the ICC profile doesn't usually alter the colour too much). But on my display, without the ICC profile all the colours outside of this sRGB colourspace are used within the game creating a rather obvious pinkish tint.

Geralt's eyes do not perceive color in the same way yours do. ;)

This is also why the nights are so bright; he has excellent low-light vision!

Many of the high gamut monitors have an sRGB mode. I use that with my eizo and most games look just fine.

The dedicated sRGB and AdobeRGB modes on my display reduce the contrast ratio to 600:1 and I still require callibration to remove the tint. While running in "standard" mode I can get a 855:1 contrast ratio with an average DeltaE of 0.19 with a maximum DeltaE of 0.81.

I'm guessing Eizo being a more professional brand of monitor probably does a good job on those settings, as I would prefer not to use colour profiles at all and just have the monitor callibrated internally; all problems solved :)

EDIT: There is a solution, it was the last one I tried, but unfortunately this solution will only help those with AMD based graphics cards. What you need to do is get a hold of powerstrip and 'capture' the colour profiles. This utility will allow you override and reload your gamma table even after the game has reset it.

If anyone needs detailed instructions if they can't decipher the process on their own (it isn't that straight forward and quite fiddly), let me know and I'll try to put a better guide together.

Oh and thanks jacobvandy for your slice of humour, you are probably quite right, Geralt is pretty damn high on mushrooms most of the time, perhaps he sees the world something like this

I am also using an ASUS VG278H with a custom .icc profile.
Actually the game is not doing anything to override the .icc profile. It's D3D to be more precise. You can find more details and [url=https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/501853/geforce-drivers/nvidia-forever-ignoring-custom-color-profile-support-in-full-screen-games-collaboration-thread]here. The game needs an option to "use desktop gamma". If I remember correct some games have this feature. Borderless windowed mode does not disable v-sync unless you are using Windows 7 with DWM (Aero) disabled. For Windows 8/8.1 DWM is always enabled by default which also makes Vsync + Triple Buffering always active as well. Which might hurt the performance compared to other methods such as Adaptive Vsync, because of standart vsync's nature.

Color Clutch should normally work in exclusive fullscreen but it does not support 64-bit applications at the moment, which is the case for the Witcher 3.

I have run into this and it completely stinks. Please CDPR if you see this post and are reading it. Add a option for us folks with calibrated monitors.

Well, that is embarrassing; I was so convinced that vsync was not working in borderless mode that I was posting about it everywhere (even had an answer flagged as a 'solution' that was based on this faulty assumption).

I thought though that the game had to be told to utilize that function SetGammaControl() and figured it was part of the gamma control slider that was built into the game (hence my rant about removing gamma control from within the game, if it doesn't call SetGammaControl() we should be fine).

Trine 2 for example is a game that has the option to use desktop gamma in fullscreen (has to be set in a config file).

I have already submitted a request to remove gamma override or include an option to use desktop gamma here. Yesterday I have received a reply from tech support that they have sent my request to the dev team. There is strength in numbers so if you are not happy with the current situation submit a request, I am sure it will be fixed in the upcoming patches.

Eh? I play in fullscreen windows with vsync off and there's no screen tearing at all, definitely no stutter either - I've found in general in most games now it's acually best to play in fullscreen windowed mode when you have the option.