using darktable in Wayland with color management?

Software darktable
,
1

I understand there are currently unresolved, but work-in-progress fixes to issues with Wayland (Wayland color management) but at least on GNOME with Wayland, there is color management with profiling and everything. And darktable runs in XWayland anyway, right? So it’s in X in Wayland. And there are ways of manually selecting a profile in darkable too.

I’ve been running in X for a while due to darktable and color management, but there are just other issues with X that Wayland solves. (Wayland has smoother performance, supports HiDPI, supports mixed DPI with monitors, fixes some security issues in X (where every app can interact with every other), and so on…)

Anyway, back to a theoretical possible way to have Wayland and color management in darktable.

darktable-cmstest returns:

darktable-cmstest version 3.1.0+2516~gcf9a63c47-dirty
this executable was built with colord support enabled
darktable itself was built with colord support enabled

couldn't locate primary CRTC!

XWAYLAND0	the X atom and colord returned the same profile
	X atom:	_ICC_PROFILE (0 bytes)
		description: (none)
	colord:	"(none)"
		description: (file not found)

Better check your system setup
 - some monitors lacked a profile
You may experience inconsistent color rendition between color managed applications

But I do have a color profile applied in Wayland in GNOME.

Screenshot from 2020-07-31 12-30-42
Screenshot from 2020-07-31 12-30-421032×739 63.3 KB

(I did have additional profiles at some point, but removed them when I made new ones. I didn’t skip from 2018 to 2020 without profiling. Or have such big gaps between those shown. :wink:)

So then I dug around a bit and found references in the documentation of darktable @ “Lighttable” in the darktable usermanual which mentions ICC profiles in $HOME/.config/darktable/color/out — and that directory didn’t exist locally.

As colord is on my system and working in Wayland (but apparently doesn’t pass information through XWayland, if I’m understanding the output darktable-cmstest properly)… I had the idea of doing a symlink from the ICC directory GNOME’s color settings use via colord. ln -s ~/.local/share/icc ~/.config/darktable/color/out — and sure enough, after starting up darktable after that, I can see the profile ICCs in the little monitor icon in the lighttable. So I set it to the same ICC as my display.

Does this work? How can I check? Things “look” “correct”, but just looking “correct” defeats the purpose of profiling.

Can someone let me know if this is a way to use color profiling on Wayland, or if any step is wrong?

Or if it’s just currently impossible to use profiled colors on Wayland (and then I guess I have to go back to X and have to put up with my laptop being halfway broken when I want to do dual-monitor setups).

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Yes setting a manual profile and making sure that the calibrations from that profile are applied to the screen should (still[1]) work (I don’t know if gnome under wayland applies the calibrations should be findable in the code though). There are 3 issues with this though

  1. It is somewhat inconvenient for the end user, the current sollutions for X11 work because an application knows on what screens it is outputting. An application on wayland might know in which output region it is but such an output region might go to multiple screens (or even be partial overlapping) so doesn’t know which output it is on
  2. large gamut displays are becoming more common and so we want full screen color management[2] and thus also a way for applications to tell if they are doing their own color management (or if not in sRGB in which color space they are) become necessary
  3. At least for gnome the provided calibration tool is fairly minimal and support is needed for other more feature full calibration tools, due to how wayland works the compositor needs to be involved in this, meaning a protocol is needed

Conclusion yes it is possible to use profiles under wayland (theoretically at least) but it is neither convenient and some features are missing that currently are available under X11. (Also we really want to get it right this time since although it works it is not the cleanest way of doing it under X)

[1] This is how it used to be under X before the color management X atom spec and colord
[2] Artist who know what is going on can probably live with user interface color being total out of whack so long as the images they are working on are correct, but is not really nice for a more normal user

1 Like
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Nice! Glad to know this is a work-around that can work for me for the time being. (And for others who really want something working right now and know how to manually set this up.)

I did some texts with exported JPEGs side-by-side with darktable, and things did look exactly the same color-wise, so I figured it was probably working. Super happy to have a confirmation that this should actually work. (Thanks, @dutch_wolf!!!)

The color profile I made was not actually done via GNOME’s color management setting, but with DisplayCal on Fedora 31 in a toolbox on Fedora 32 (to work-around the lack of Python 2 in Fedora 32). More info in this thread: DisplayCAL and Fedora 32 - #12 by garrett. Wacky, right?

But, yeah, this all feels like a stack of cards just be able to run a modern distro with Wayland to have things work. (At least on my very nice, but standard display.)

For everyone who doesn’t want to jump through hoops, keep using X for now, I guess?

Looking forward to the eventual progress where everything works by default again, in Wayland.

4

Yeah pretty much.

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Hello, I know that this topis is a bit old, but I have question related to ICC display profile and softproof. I’m using DT4 in Fedora 35 with Wayland compositor. I know that using color management in Wayland is not working and I used the same approach as @garrett above. In lighttable I can clearly see the difference between custom (calibrated) display profile for my screen (DELL) and system display profile which is the same as sRGB. This is clear to me. But when I go into darktable, set display profile to my custom and the softproof profile to sRGB I suppose to see the same difference like in the lighttable, am I right? But there is no difference in these two version (softproof ON/OFF). ICC custom profile is below. So where is the problem? Is this right behavior and I got something wrong?
dell_p2414h.icc (4.1 KB)
Lighttable settings
LT
Darktable settings
DT

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Hi again, I did some research with screen custom profile, Darktable and Wayland because I’m more and more confused.

  1. In system settings I use my profile which was created with calibrating hardware and I can clearly see the difference in colors and brightness in whole system. Even in DT, Geeqie and so on. So I assume that what I see is as close as possible to calibrating profile sRGB.
  2. In DT for a display profile when I use system profile/sRGB web safe everything looks the same as before, but I’m still looking at calibrated screen from step no. 1, am I right?
  3. But when I use for a display profile my custom screen profile from step no. 1, colors are even more brighter then in step 2. It looks like another layer with brightness was added (like a custom profile is applied two times - in system and then in DT).

So my question is, when the system (Wayland) overrides everything is still necessary to set display profile in DT even if darktable-cmstest gives none? Another option is not to use system color management and use that calibrated profile just in darktable and image viewer, but then I’m not looking at calibrated screen, right?
My problem is I can’t decide against what setting I should edit my photos because I thing the right one is that from step 3, but I’m afraid that the picture would be too dark because I edit quite bright image.

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wayland and color management is a mess!
There is no calibration tool that works with wayland. And the wayland-developers give a shit about color management. Once of them was questioned about color management … answer: “Color…what? I don’t need that!” Actually wayland is on the same chaotic way as X11. Use Linux for decades and color management was’nt all the time as easy as it should but now it is only a mess.

1 Like
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And the wayland-developers give a shit about color management. Once of them was questioned about color management … answer: “Color…what? I don’t need that!” Actually wayland is on the same chaotic way as X11. Use Linux for decades and color management was’nt all the time as easy as it should but now it is only a mess.

If that was really their answer then I don’t know what to say… totally amateurish response, to say the least.

9

Don’t spread wrong information, the quote is from an old dt dev who is insulting every body anyway and not just Wayland devs.

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10

Please continue the discussion here Wayland color management