Wayland color management

I am experimenting with Hyprland and apparently I am finding out that it is actually possible to live in Wayland if you have a wide gamut screen. darktable seems to work fine with Xwayland and is color managed (just put the screen profile to .config/darktable/color/out), and it is also possible to set the screen profile inside Firefox which is a Wayland native. So for now the best thing to do is actually disabling system wide Wayland color management. But I have to do further tests with Digikam etc. So the only thing that is really still missing in Wayland is calibration/profiling software.

5 Likes

Thanks for the hint, I was going through xiccd but since I only need profiles for Darktable this should be much easier.

2 Likes

both digiKam and RawTherapee are actually Wayland native

3 Likes

Geeqie does not start on Arco Linux Hyprland live (can’t install Flatpak) but XnView is Wayland native and color managed (monitor profile can be set inside the program)

1 Like

You know what I truly don’t understand and it really boggles my mind?
Where are the people from all the huge companies releasing graphics software for Linux? Why aren’t they engaging in the discussion? They are, after all, making huge amounts of money from it and they would make even more. I think it’s probably worth mentioning them here and maybe us “banding together” might be worth to bring this issue to the attention of the big software companies that actually stand to directly profit from that work.

Just some of the huge “industry” software that works on Linux and required proper color management:

BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve also Fusion
Adobe Substance 3D
Autodesk Maya
Maxon (various software like Cinema 4D etc.)
SideFX Houdini
Foundry (various software like Nuke)
Otoy Render Engine (“The world’s first spectrally correct, unbiased render engine”…)
RodeoFX OpenWalter
ftrack
BorisFX
Weta Digital
And about Weta Digital, here is a quote from Dustin Kirkland:

Next I attended Paul Gunn’s talk in the SysAdmin Track on Weta Digital’s effects rendering data center, here in Wellington. Very early in the talk, he noted that 90% of their artists run the Ubuntu Desktop, with the remaining 10% using Windows. Adobe Photoshop is one of the few remaining apps that still need Windows for. He went on to talk more about their server render farm, noting that all of their 35,000 cores are also running Ubuntu. In the talk, he called these “Ubuntu Servers”, which to me meant that they were installed from the Ubuntu Server seed.

Also, I remember one guy telling me how they only use Linux to produce Dr. Who, after a bit of digging, I’ve found out that Linux has been used at BBC by content producers since 1999!!

There are also “Linux” foundations that are apparently involved with VFX industry etc. How come none of their people are involved in the discussion?
https://vfxplatform.com/linux/
https://www.aswf.io/

What I’m wondering is when will everyone stop pretending like Linux is not used in the graphics industries? It’s literally everywhere, the only proprietary software that comes to Linux is precisely that kind and yet the OS itself gets the least love in that area.
Wayland has an opportunity to make something right here. Atm the best color management is on MacOS so it would need to be at least on par with that.
Maybe we need to do some outreach to those proprietary software vendors for something to actually be done? This is a bipartisan issue, both foss and closed after all xD

You also said you wanted a concrete things you could share with devs. I just want to reintroduce this into the thread in case some ppl have missed it and since the link to the original seems to be broken:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211028152104/https://www.argyllcms.com/CM_requirements.txt

4 Likes

The current standard is RHEL (or clone) where X11 is at least supported until 2032 (longer if you pay extra).

Future features - Confidence in the distribution provider addressing VFX-specific
needs such as Wayland support for complex DCC tools, and support for
specialized hardware such as professional HDR, wide gamut and XR displays.

So, it’s up to the distro (RHEL) to fix the issues before X11 is EOL.

3 Likes

in defense of my colleagues in the vfx industry, they 1) are engaged quite a bit in the aswf and 2) are very busy people indeed. i don’t see people working under such deadlines and with these workloads (getting renderers/compositor nodes/texture drawing programs right, pushing shots out the door) also fixing the base system unless it is broken.

3 Likes

May I note that under x11 the CM is also not in a perfect shape. Here I shortly described my exercises attempting to get 10-bit from X11 pipeline. Lost in vain…
…which in turn may suggest that we won’t get a proper CM until 2032…

I’ll still take “not perfect” (but still works, x11) vs not working or complete Wayland :man_shrugging:

2 Likes

can you prove that the gnome wayland colormgmt stuff, which they have for quite a while already, doesnt work?

Loading an ICC profile isn’t color management; its half of what’s needed.

Running displaycal in a native Wayland window, completing the profiling and loading the resulting ICC profile is what is needed. The protocol has barely been written and not even sure its merged, so how could it work?

3 Likes

Add the issue of apps (like gimp, krita, inkscape, blender) not supporting wayland way of doing colour management yet, which is not just one way but two or three way depending on which desktop environment you run the app. And I do not think apps (which are now running under xwayland, which is probably stuck in sRGB space) have working colour management under wayland yet.

4 Likes

Yes, they’re working on it.

But it isn’t implemented and its not done.

you are assuming that i am talking about the new color management protocol. I am not. gnome had a workaround in place for years. i am talking about that one.

2 Likes

This is for gaming and HDR not about graphic design photography and creative apps. I know you think it is possible right now but it is not. None of the apps that we care support native wayland colour management right now.

Again we really really want to use it we want to ditch X11 so bad but sadly it is not possible right now.

It’s work that’s being done in areas that end up sharing the same problems that need solving. He didn’t say anything was ready at the moment, merely that work is being made, so that’s a rather strange reply.

That said, HDR is as relevant for ‘creative apps’, than anything else we’ve been talking about here.

1 Like

The focus is more in the gaming side from what I see. Yes we are very fortunate HDR shares things with colour management.

Here they announce dropping x11 in RHEL10 which is due in 2025. I noticed that they mentioned color mgmt as #1 in their todo list.

2 Likes

RHEL10 is not that important (or what they decided to drop). When 10 is released most users have just moved to 8/9, and they will stay on that for several years. IMHO v10 will probably be a bad release if X11 is dropped, so better to just skip it (probably fixed in v11, famous last words :stuck_out_tongue: ).

1 Like