Darktable 5.2.1 and failing Color Management

Software darktable
1

Hi all!

Im running Darktable 5.2.1 (AppImage) on Ubuntu 24 Wayland. Little CMS is activated under Processing in the Preferences menu. On the little screen (down&right) in lighttable view I have selected system profile. However - this is NOT working as the system profile is not used (I have confirmed this using other software). Also, there seems to be no way to manually apply profiles - which is necessary when soft proofing for instance (where I personally need to apply a Luster profile for printing). After struggling for a couple of days I am not really getting anywhere - does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?

Cheers
Peter

2

darktable doesn’t support color management on wayland yet. Although gnome and kde are making progress and the APIs are now ready (except profiling the monitor), they haven’t been implemented into darktable yet.

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3

So if I have a colour managed Wayland system with a wide gamut monitor and run dt, will I get accurate colours, but limited to a default srgb, or will I get inaccurate stretched colours?

4

Does this mean that there is no color management in Darktable at all?

5

Improved support is coming in 5.4:

2 Likes
6

When is 5.4 coming? And what is improved support? Does improved mean that Color Management, display profiles and soft proofing profiles will work (may be added)?

7

It’s coming at Christmas. There are two releases per year: one in June and one in December.
Based on the PRs I linked, display profiles should work.

2 Likes
8

I stand corrected, this is pretty great news, good to see :slight_smile:

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9

As both of these are merged, testing the 5.3. development (master) branch and nightly builds on Wayland would be very welcome. :wink:

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10

You can get the test version here: Release Darktable nightly build 20251107 ¡ darktable-org/darktable ¡ GitHub

Make sure to back up the config and the database, in case you want to revert to 5.2.1.

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11

Is color management supposed to work with Ubuntu on Xorg? I cant get it to work there either with 5.2.1.

12

Yes, it works. Your setup may be broken. Please run darktable-cmstest, and report the results here. Paste the output between ``` markers:

```
pasted output here
```
1 Like
13

It is also possible to just put the icc profile imto ~./config/darktable/color/out.
Thats how it works on KDE Plasma 6.x. System wide wayland color management needs to be switched off for now.

14

It also works if it’s set in config. I actually use a shell script that loads it and then launches darktable.

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15

I dont have this folder: ./config/darktable/color/out I only got until this: ./config/darktable/

When I run the cmstest I am getting this in Xorg:

flatpak run --command=darktable-cmstest org.darktable.Darktable
F: Not sharing “/usr/share/color/icc” with sandbox: Path “/usr” is reserved by Flatpak
darktable-cmstest version 5.2.1
this executable was built with colord support enabled
darktable itself was built with colord support enabled

primary CRTC is at CRTC 0
CRTC for screen 0 CRTC 1 has no mode or no output, skipping
CRTC for screen 0 CRTC 2 has no mode or no output, skipping

HDMI-3 the X atom and colord returned the same profile
X atom: _ICC_PROFILE (740464 bytes)
description: CS240 #1 2020-05-07 18-27 2.2 F-S XYZLUT+MTX
colord: “/home/peter/.local/share/icc/CS240 #1 2020-05-07 18-27 2.2 F-S XYZLUT+MTX.icc”
description: CS240 #1 2020-05-07 18-27 2.2 F-S XYZLUT+MTX

Your system seems to be correctly configured

I am getting this in Wayland:

flatpak run --command=darktable-cmstest org.darktable.Darktable
F: Not sharing “/usr/share/color/icc” with sandbox: Path “/usr” is reserved by Flatpak
darktable-cmstest version 5.2.1
this executable was built with colord support enabled
darktable itself was built with colord support enabled

primary CRTC is at CRTC 0

HDMI-3 the X atom and colord returned different profiles
X atom: _ICC_PROFILE (0 bytes)
description: (none)
colord: “/home/peter/.local/share/icc/CS240 #1 2020-05-07 18-27 2.2 F-S XYZLUT+MTX.icc”
description: CS240 #1 2020-05-07 18-27 2.2 F-S XYZLUT+MTX

Better check your system setup

  • some monitors reported different profiles
    You may experience inconsistent color rendition between color managed applications
16

Maybe check prefences → misc → method to use for getting the display profile, and try setting it to colord.

17

It makes no difference.

18

Tried 5.3 now - cant get color management there either.

19

There are 2 parts of colour management:

  1. letting the application know about how to convert from its working space to your display’s space;
  2. loading correction settings into your card’s LUTs

The setting I mentioned does the first.

Exactly what difference do you expect, how do you determine if colour management in darktable works or not?

This is how I load my display profile; it populates the LUT and sets up the config variables, as well (the 2nd command is just a check):

dispwin -I '/oldhome/shared_data/media/digicam/colour-management-profiles/dispcalGUI/storage/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX.icc' 
dispwin -V '/oldhome/shared_data/media/digicam/colour-management-profiles/dispcalGUI/storage/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX.icc'

It’s not really needed, as KDE seems to load everything fine now, but I used to have issues, that’s when I created the script.

kofa@eagle:~$ dispwin -V '/oldhome/shared_data/media/digicam/colour-management-profiles/dispcalGUI/storage/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX.icc' 
Dispwin: Warning - new_dispwin: Expected VideoLUT depth 11 doesn't match actual 10
Verify: '/oldhome/shared_data/media/digicam/colour-management-profiles/dispcalGUI/storage/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX.icc' IS loaded (discrepancy 0.1%)
kofa@eagle:~$ ~/darktable-master/bin/darktable-cmstest 
darktable-cmstest version 5.3.0+747~g0e6abcc4eb
this executable was built with colord support enabled
darktable itself was built with colord support enabled

primary CRTC is at CRTC 0
CRTC for screen 0 CRTC 1 has no mode or no output, skipping
CRTC for screen 0 CRTC 2 has no mode or no output, skipping
CRTC for screen 0 CRTC 3 has no mode or no output, skipping

DP-2    the X atom and colord returned the same profile
        X atom: _ICC_PROFILE (969640 bytes)
                description: U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX
        colord: "/var/lib/colord/icc/U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX.icc"
                description: U2720Q #1 2024-07-13 10-06 D6500 S XYZLUT+MTX

Your system seems to be correctly configured

You can manually create ~/.config/darktable/color/out (note that the original path had a typo):
mkdir -p ~/.config/darktable/color/out The copy (cp) or link (ln`) your profile into it.
Finally, in darktable, you’ll be able to select it if you right-click the ‘horseshoe’ icon, then select it in the dropdown:

image
image843×348 40.4 KB

But once again, that’s only the application side of things, not the video card’s LUTs.

20

I compare the same picture in Darktable and PhotoLine which runs through wine. The images are quite different and PhotoLine shows correct colors.