Hard time with color management + VirtualBox

Cilyan · 2015-10-04 14:30:46

Hello there!
I'm having a hard time with color management on my desktop. I do photography as a hobby, and that's kinda important, but I do not manage to get consistent colors, even between application that claim are color managed. My screen is an ASUS VE278 that I place in "sRGB" mode, and I calibrate it using dispcalGUI and a Spyder 5 PRO. After having tried Darktable and Rawtherapee, I now use Lightroom in a VirtualBox. Here is the same image loaded in different applications:

From left to right and top to bottom:

Windows Photo Viewer on VB: looks exactly the same as I edited into Lightroom
Firefox, supposed to support partially CM: A little bluer and lighter which lets more noise appear
GIMP, claiming full CM support, profile is loaded into the prefs: Greener than on Windows, and maybe a little more contrast
Shotwell, no to only partial CM support (hard to tell): Same rendering as Firefox
Eye of Mate, no CM support (it branched too early from EoG): much bluer, and thus much more noisy
Darktable, claiming full support of CM: same as EoM; just a little less blue

The image is available here: http://www.cilyan.org/photos/uploads/bi … f0f039.jpg
Here is a screenshot before I adjusted the profile again (I forgot to do it when I changed the graphic card, and it seems I had a problem with the white point setting). The difference between application is even more visible (Windows/GIMP/EoM/Shotwell): https://i.imgur.com/APPbCwf.jpg
Just in case, the profile: http://www.cilyan.org/misc/ASUS%20VE278 … UT+MTX.icc

So my questions:
Which application(s) should I trust for a correct rendering?
How can I check that the color profile is applied/used properly? (I tested the profile itself using "dispcal -H -y l -r" and the values where OK)
How do I setup Windows so that the colors in the VM are good? I heard that no setup is needed, but I'm not sure of it. I never heard of VirtualBox having support for Gamut correction and the video LUT, which is always applied is probably not sufficient.

Thanks a lot for any help!

t0m5k1 · 2015-10-06 15:36:07

Interesting post which will help me further convince my Wife to use linux

Any way I found some links which I feel may help you:

(these are in no specific order)

https://encrypted.pcode.nl/blog/2012/01 … -on-linux/

https://jcornuz.wordpress.com/category/tutorials/
this site has quite a lot of info on this subject but these 2 links jumped out at me:
https://jcornuz.wordpress.com/2007/11/1 … cms-linux/
https://jcornuz.wordpress.com/2007/11/0 … -in-linux/

Good luck with this & please keep posting back your findings as I am subbing this thread & bookmarking it

EDITS:
http://archive09.linux.com/articles/43337
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/OpenIcc/

Should have checked this first lol:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ICC_profiles

Last edited by t0m5k1 (2015-10-06 15:39:45)

Cilyan · 2015-10-06 20:27:15

Hi t0m5k1, thanks for the links. I stumbled upon some of them, but the others are new, so I'll have a look at them to see if there is something new.

On my side, I found one old link here about CM in VirtualBox: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic … 188#p78689

I'm not entirely satisfied, and I'm not sure these changed anything in the colors rendered by Lightroom, and (proprietary philosophy) there seems to be no way to tell if the monitor profile is accepted and used by Lightroom. However, I installed the Spyder SW on Windows and there is a tool called "Profile Chooser" that properly detects the installed profile, so I hope this works. I'm still trying to confirm that it is used.

On the other side, I noticed that despite what is said in all the different posts, dispcalGUI creates by default a profile with intent "Perceptual", and when I set this in GIMP, the color match way better. I'm not entirely satisfied though. Today, I ran a calibration with intent "relative colorimetry", only to find my display completely purple when I came back! At least it demonstrates that the profile is applied! I'm probably wrong, but maybe the profile applied to the monitor should be perceptual, and GIMP should use the relative one... I'll try.

I'll continue my investigation, but I think when all is set up correctly, this will entirely deserve a blog post!

Arch Linux

#1 2015-10-04 14:30:46

Hard time with color management + VirtualBox

#2 2015-10-06 15:36:07

Re: Hard time with color management + VirtualBox

#3 2015-10-06 20:27:15

Re: Hard time with color management + VirtualBox

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