Comments on: ICC Profiles and GNOME

By: Hak Engel

Hak Engel — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:59:57 +0000

There has been lots of work going on in this area. Everyone interested should be part of the OpenICC group. The work on the KDE side is much farther along than on the GNOME side and the OpenICC group would be very happy to have more participation from the GNOME side.

I should add that there is work underway on the printing side (CUPS and GhostScript, common print dialog, Oyranos interation…) to have full CM support for printing. OpenICC has been working with the OpenPrinting group on this for about 2 years now.

By: Hak Engel

Hak Engel — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:47:31 +0000

The EDID also contains the monitors serial number. Oyranos uses the make/model/serial number from the EDID to identify the monitors connected to a system. The reason that “..either automatically download, or failing that provide the user with a url to the web page where they could download them” will not work is that no website in existence will ever have the correct profile for YOUR monitor. At best these web sites will have a generic profile that is correct for only the monitor that was used to create it.

Remember these profiles are hardware specific and are individual to each device because of sample to sample variations.

By: Hak Engel

Hak Engel — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:40:38 +0000

These ICC profile are hardware specific and to set this up correctly the profiles need to be custom made for the specific hardware. How could the system figure out how to match the profiles to the hardware without the user specifying this in some type of configuration system/app?

By: Hak Engel

Hak Engel — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 19:37:38 +0000

This is correct about Oyranos being a color management specific setting frame work. The OpenICC group has been working on this for some time and has had 3 related Google Summer of Code projects. This is actually more advanced than just creating color management settings for monitors and it includes printer, cameras and scanners as well.

In addition one of the OpenICC GSoC projects was to create a KDE front end for Oyranos as an example of how this would look/work. This is named Kolor Manager and is available in the playground section of KDE SVN. Work on this is still underway but it is hoped that it will be ready for KDE 4.4. OpenICC would like to have someone create a GNOME specific version of this at some point.

By: Glen

Glen — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:58:28 +0000

I have been using ArgyllCMS using a DTP-94 (still available from Integrated Color Corp for $150) along with dispcalGUI as the GUI. This works very well. Previously, I used ArgyllCMS from the command line with good results.

I’m not sure the DTP-94 is still a good choice, it works well with CRTS and LCDs, cannot profile printers or scanners, but may not have the sensing range to fully do one of the newer wide gamut LCDs. It works fine with my monitor which covers about 94% of Adobe RGB.

I would think that having GNOME adapt a “normal” method for installing profiles such as those provided from the manufacturer for monitors, printers, and scanners would be an excellent start towards a standard color management method.

By: Sven Arvidsson

Sven Arvidsson — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:24:30 +0000

There was some talk about this a few years back, but nothing seems to have happened.

A few ideas are collected here though,
http://live.gnome.org/ColourManagement

By: Perry Lorier

Perry Lorier — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:26:29 +0000

You can query the monitor with read-edid, this contains what make/model your monitor is. With a web service you could perhaps either automatically download, or failing that provide the user with a url to the web page where they could download them.

By: Arpad Borsos

Arpad Borsos — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:54:43 +0000

In an ideal world, the xserver would just do the right thing based on the EDID data the display is sending, without any gui or config app whatsoever.

By: FunkyM

FunkyM — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:15:08 +0000

Stumbled upon exactly the same thing with my multi-head setup.
Infact for basic functionality, the work is quite straightforward and I proposed it for GSoC’08.

A gnome-color-management UI could let you select the ICC profiles found in the search path (/usr/share/color/icc, /usr/color/icc, ~/color/icc, …) for a specific display. Code needed to actually read data out of the profile (to display in the UI perhaps with some fancy LUT graphic) and to apply it to a display could actually be taken from xcalib.

Regarding applications and profiles. Forget that for now. The whole topic is also not given priority further down the stack as there is still talks how/where to apply ICC profiles to [1] and how XRandR/Xinerama should behave.

A simple profile selector should happen first which applies a profile on session start and that would already fill a big hole. Integration with applications and calibration devices should come later, however some applications already have their own code for profile management.

[1] http://www.oyranos.org/wiki/index.php?title=ICC_Profiles_in_X_Specification_0.4

By: Nicolas Mailhot

Nicolas Mailhot — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:54:04 +0000

Oyranos http://www.oyranos.org/ is probably the existing project that matches best your objectives, and I’m sure they’d like help to plug it in GNOME, so I’d suggest contacting them.