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I would find it a useful aid when helping people if we compiled a simple table of all current software capable of displaying images along with info on whether they support color management, how (manual/colord/oyranos/etc, whether its possible to additionally set this manually or whether the system-wide setting is forced), and whether they support setting a rendering intent and how. No detailed info, just the basics which one needs to know to get an image to look correct.
Please list the applications in alphabetical order.
Program
Monitor ICC
Monitor Rendering Intent
Chromium/Chrome
Partially supported. Monitor ICC can be set to sRGB, P3, scRGB, color spin (for testing) and "specified by the operating system".
Hard-coded to perceptual. BPC unknown, appears to be enabled.
darktable
Set manually or automatically loaded, either from _ICC_PROFILE[_n] or colord. On OSX only sRGB supported (AFAIK).
Set manually.
digiKam (needs to be verified whether correct for 5.4.0)
Force-set automatically from _ICC_PROFILE if set, manually changing only possible when _ICC_PROFILE not set.
Force-set (from CMS?), manually changing not possible.
Those ICC v2 vs v4 tests which so many sites are fussed up about widely miss the point. All they tell you is whether your browser can handle embedded profiles. So what if it can but doesn’t use the monitor’s color profile? You’re still seeing wrong colors.
PhotoFlow supports monitor profiles. One can manually specify the monitor profile and rendering intent in the preferences, and under OSX it also supports reading the system profile (only implemented in the current “stable” and “linear_gamma” branches).
Monitor profile handling under OSX is achieved via a patched version of GTK/Cairo that “bypasses” the assumption that the image data is in sRGB colorspace and the automatic conversion from sRGB to the system monitor profile.
Regarding which applications are color-managed, and which are not, just saying “color managed or not”, “monitor rendering intent settable or not”, and “allows user to choose the monitor profile or else enforces the system-wide settings” leaves out some relevant differences that users can trip right over. For example:
Geeqie doesn’t color manage pngs.
RawTherapee can color-manage a png, but doesn’t recognize whether the png has an embedded ICC profile, so the user has to go to Colors tab and assign the right ICC profile from disk.
And then there is the matter of properly displaying a linear gamma RGB image:
Geeqie color-manages 16-bit integer linear gamma tiffs, but the shadows are severely posterized
DigiKam color-manages linear gamma RGB images, but the shadow tonality is distorted, and the smaller the zoom (for example 10% zoom) the worse the distortion, at least on my installation of Gentoo Linux with digiKam 5.7.0. I’m planning to file a bug report.
Krita has a user-settable option to allow the user to not use LCMS optimizations, with a recommendation to not use the optimizations when displaying linear gamma images. So Krita users aren’t forced to see distorted shadow tonality in linear gamma images. GIMP 2.9 also has this option, but as far as I can tell when using or not using this option in GIMP, either way shadow tonality is correctly displayed regardless of the zoom.
Regarding Krita (which isn’t yet on the list), yes, it’s color-managed for RGB/CMYK/LAB/XYZ, the user can choose between system-set and self-selected monitor profiles, and the conversion intent is selectable.
I think Chrome supports color management these days, it certainly works in my color-managed fedora 27 desktop, chrome display of JPGs that have embedded / non-sRGB ICC now matches firefox which wasn’t the case a few years back. See browser status here:
Missing apps that are color managed: Inkscape, UFraw
A generic question for the audience of this post - in my linux desktop I use one non-opensource tool for processing HDR (no need to name it since it doesn’t belong here), this app does some image processing and has a preview window that sadly is not color-managed in linux - it just assumes that the image is sRGB, which on my wide-gamut display causes the previews to look extremely saturated. Is there any tool to “force” color correction on specific apps that are not color-management-aware (sRGB > proper color space)? or any other workaround
This is on Fedora 27 (X11 sessions)
Chrome seems to have partial color management support, for matrix monitor profiles but not for LUT monitor profiles. See this post:
I doubt if Chrome supports black point compensation, but I don’t know how to access the Chrome color management settings, or even if it’s possible to access Chrome color management settings.