The state of color

Posted May 14, 2015 14:28 UTC (Thu) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
Parent article: The state of color

One of the difficulties I've encountered with color management is the lack of [any] multi-monitor support by applications. I run 3 wide gamut displays both at home and work. I generate ICC profiles with a colorimeter for each individual display. X handles per display profiles reasonably well via either argyll-dispwin or gnome3. The trouble is that virtually all color aware applications such as firefox, darktable, or gimp only support a single manually set display profile and have no awareness of which display they are rendering on. For my current setup(s) this isn't critical as the displays on each system are identical models with reasonably similar profiles. However, the situation would be painful with mixed response displays.

The state of color

Posted May 14, 2015 15:00 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (4 responses)

That's true for application that rely on the X11 atom for getting the icc profile: while there's pages out there that suggest that that system works in a multi-monitor setup, it doesn't, at all.

However, colord supports multi-monitor support quite well, and that's the reason I ported Krita 2.9 from the X11 atom system to colord, so at least Krita now supports per-monitor profiles out of the box. And I know it works, because I use it with the dell/cintiq hybrid companion setup I use to develop Krita :-)

The state of color

Posted May 21, 2015 4:40 UTC (Thu) by gwg (guest, #20811) [Link] (3 responses)

> That's true for application that rely on the X11 atom for getting the icc profile: while
> there's > pages out there that suggest that that system works in a multi-monitor setup,
> it doesn't, at all.

It works fine using X11 & XRANDR, as mentioned by the OP.

> However, colord supports multi-monitor support quite well, and that's the reason I
> ported Krita 2.9 > from the X11 atom system to colord, so at least Krita now supports
> per-monitor profiles out of the > box. And I know it works, because I use it with
> the dell/cintiq hybrid companion setup I use to develop Krita :-)

That's pity and a real step backwards. The X11 mechanism is system independent - it will work with any system the X11 server and client are running on, as well as remotely, just as X11 should. In contrast, colord is Linux distro. specific, and some sort of parallel remote connection would be needed for it to work with a remote X11 display.

The state of color

Posted May 21, 2015 8:55 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

"It works fine using X11 & XRANDR, as mentioned by the OP. "

No, it doesn't.

"That's pity and a real step backward"

No, it isn't.

The state of color

Posted May 21, 2015 11:24 UTC (Thu) by gwg (guest, #20811) [Link] (1 responses)

> No, it doesn't.
> No, it isn't.

I bow to your deep and detailed explanations.

I guess I'm simply imagining that my code works.

The state of color

Posted May 21, 2015 13:42 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I don't know your code, so I don't know if it works. Heck, I don't recognize your nick, so I don't know who you are and what you're working on. I don't owe you any deep and detailed explanations either. But what the heck...

What I do know is that the icc profiles in X spec is dead as a doornail, just check it: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/icc_profil.... It's always been a very iffy spec with no two applications interpreting it the same way, so it never worked in practice. Sure, _you_ may feel that _you_ did it right and got it working, but that means zilch if no other application uses it the same way. And it's a dead spec anyway.

As for your goings on about colord being Linux only, and remote X11 displays -- I don't care. There is no reason for me to care. There is nobody using X11 except for Linux users anymore, and there's nothing Linux specific about colord anyway.

If there's anyone left who uses FreeBSD or Solaris or AIX or HPUX or whatever, they can port colord. Maybe they already did, I don't know. And using an application like Krita over a remote connection is a completely ridiculous proposition anway. So, yeah, short and clear: it's not a pity and not a step backwards for Krita to use colord instead of _ICC_PROFILE. It's a step forwards, because Krita now works with multiple moniros for the majority of Linux users (who now have it better than Windows users, who still need to manually configure the monitor profiles).