System color profile leading to different RGB values?

I did not know that the icc profile can be included in the picture… Actually, I made that image on my laptop where I did not use any color management. That’s why there is no information included.

I just made a second version on my computer with the color management running.
I’ve done better this time, much more beautiful I would say :wink:

The icc information is included now.
Channel_Mixer_Test_W520.tif (8.7 MB)
The funny thing is that I was not able to draw the desired colors with RGB 255 0 0 for red for example. I added the correct RGB values in gimp, but red is now 243 14 11. Only black and white are as expected…
This is really weird, I think my color management is messed up completely…

1 Like

You could probably make a smaller simpler image and upload a XCF as well so we can see whether you did something unusual in GIMP.

I opened your first image with my hack software and turned off the color management display conversion, and all your values are as expected. The picture is fine…

I’m just wondering how darktable was able to make a display conversion without an embedded profile.

Hi Mica,
I had never heard of the i3-wm before. I played around with it last night. I gotta say I’m amazed! Very tidy, easy and straight forward.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t help my color management problem…

Last night I reinstalled my color management.
Unfortunately with the same result. I must have repeated my mistake…
I don’t question my profile. I think I have to solve a problem with my color management, i.e. xiccd or colord.

I did reset my color management:

[marco@W520 ~]$ xprop -display :0.0 -len 14 -root _ICC_PROFILE
_ICC_PROFILE: no such atom on any window.

On the weekend I will go through the whole process again. For that I will use this description:
https://encrypted.pcode.nl/blog/2013/11/24/display-color-profiling-on-linux/

Is it still up to date, or is there a more comprehensive description for setting up the color management under linux available?

@ggbutcher I’m not sure what to expect here, isn’t it that the colors are displayed adjusted according to the color profile used? Do I always need to embed the profile also in the picture?

I always make sure any JPEG, TIFF, or PNG I save has an embedded profile that represents the image’s colorspace. And, that colorspace is almost always sRGB; that’s for anyone who wants to look at it that doesn’t have color management, chances are their consumer display will be close to sRGB.

Just went back in the thread; thought I had posted this reference here but hadn’t:

I wrote this after trudging through just what you’re experiencing now. It might help you focus attention toward the thing that isn’t behaving…

2 Likes

It is a good habit to include the ICC profile; however, there is no guarantee that the app or renderer would honour or be able to read it; particularly, the PNG, even though the ICC chunk has been standard since 2004. In addition, it can be removed automatically by web apps and sites to save space or as a security measure.

So, I also convert the data to sRGB, though I know there are still many interpretations of it and many more environments that aren’t colour managed. We can only do so much! :see_no_evil:

Which version of XFCE are you running in Manjaro? 4.14 supports colour management. Are you using the colour management dialogue to apply the colour profiles to your monitor? xfce:xfce4-settings:4.14:color [Xfce Docs]

This is the colour management dialogue in Mint 19.3 XFCE, which uses XFCE 4.14 (although I’m currently running Mint 19.3 Cinnamon)

On Manjaro I had also running 4.14. I did not use that dialogue to activate it, but the information on it was the similar as on your screenshot…

1 Like

I also run xfce and face the same issue. x atom and colord have a profile with the same description but x atom shows _ICC_PROFILE whereas colord shows a path to the icc profile.

Do you also encounter the change of RGB values when switching the display profile?

1 Like

I’ve certainly noticed a change in the colours on that Channel_Mixer_Test_W520.tif , when I switch the display profile in Darktable from sRGB, to my calibrated monitor profile… Red is only 255,0,0 when I use the sRGB display profile in Darktable, otherwise it is something like 144,17,5 .

I have set my display profile using the gnome colour manager in Mint Cinnamon… So I’m also now confused!

I’d have though that the system display profile would only affect how the colours are displayed in the window manager, and not affect the actual RGB values of the image in for example Darktable. E.g. red would still be 255,0,0, even if the display profile swapped red & green over.

No, I have 0,0,0 for all profiles. The only oddity I see is that under histogram profile I see the entry system display profile twice :wink:
I am running darktable 3.1.0+687~g186252465

1 Like

I also have two entries of system display profile under histogram profile, I never noticed that before… Im running dt 3.0.0

How did you set up your color management? Did you use the tool @Brian_Innes mentioned above?
Is your xiccd also running as user process and your colord as system process, which Linux distro are you using?

Sorry for that many questions. But I would like to figure out where the difference is between our systems.
Obviously we both have a similar problem with our color management, similar system running, but in your case RGB values are rock solid… In contrast to mine or @Brian_Innes

██████████████████ ████████ OS: Manjaro Linux x86_64
██████████████████ ████████ Host: MACH-WX9 M1A
████████ ████████ Kernel: 5.5.2-1-MANJARO
████████ ████████ ████████ Uptime: 9 hours, 50 mins
████████ ████████ ████████ Packages: 1405 (pacman)
████████ ████████ ████████ Shell: bash 5.0.11
████████ ████████ ████████ Resolution: 3000x2000
████████ ████████ ████████ DE: Xfce
████████ ████████ ████████ WM: Xfwm4
████████ ████████ ████████ WM Theme: Default-xhdpi
████████ ████████ ████████ Theme: Matcha-sea [GTK2], Adwaita [GTK3]
████████ ████████ ████████ Icons: Papirus-Maia [GTK2], Adwaita [GTK3]
Terminal: xfce4-terminal
Terminal Font: Monospace 12
CPU: Intel i7-8550U (8) @ 4.000GHz
GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce MX150
Memory: 4619MiB / 15765MiB
I did nothing special, colord is run by systemd, xiccd is launched from my xfce4-session (I guess that answers your x-atom question. If not please tell me how to find that out).

Question. (Perhaps a silly one!)
Would applying a colour profile twice, be the cause of these issues with darktable reporting an incorrect colour from the colour dropper?

I’m running Linux Mint (Cinnamon), and I’ve applied my calibrated monitor colour profile using the gnome colour manager. I’ve also set darktable to use the calibrated monitor profile for the display profile. So would this mean that the colour date is getting managed twice? I.e. once by the system display profile, and again by the display profile in darktable?

I don’t think so. From the Gnome Color Manager doc:

“The GNOME Color Manager communicates the selected profiles to color-aware applications, maintaining the color across applications.”

Most of the color management I know doesn’t actually do the conversion; it just maintains the display profiles for all the connected displays and provides them to the applications, who do the heavy lifting before pushing the pixels to the display. Apple is different in that regard, and also what they’re trying to do to Wayland…

1 Like

So probably safer to set Darktable to use system colour profile then?

I think the symptoms with non-zero black RGB values are similar to this issue: Choice of display profile affects histogram, color picker values and overexposure indicators · Issue #3271 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub
Does that look familiar? How does your display profile tone response curve look like, do the curves touch the origin? I unfortunately still haven’t found time to look for a fix and the real root cause. :confused:

1 Like