Arch Linux

Storm

Member

From: Hungary

Registered: 2014-09-12

Posts: 139

Website

Color correction profiles applied twice in color managed apps [KDE]

This is an issue I had in the past, then it went away at an unknown point in time, and now it's back. I don't know if this is an upstream bug in KDE, or it's an issue in Arch, so I'm posting to both places.

The issue:

KDE has system-wide color management. I have both my screens calibrated and profiled and the resulting ICC profiles are applied by KDE. However, in applications that have their own color management, the profile seems to be applied twice, making images look incorrect.

Copy-paste from the KDE thread ( https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=6 … 81#p436381 ):

images with color profiles will look wrong in color managed applications (lighter and less saturated).
- Turning color management off in the app makes it appear correctly, and the same as in non-color managed apps.
- Saving the image without embedded profile causes it to appear correctly.
- Embedding the basic sRGB profile, which in theory is the same what apps should fall back to if no profile is embedded, will still cause the image to appear lighter and less-saturated than it should.

Since the previous time I re-calibrated my screens a bit differently, now the ICC profiles lighten the screen much less compared to how the screens look without the calibration enabled, and the issue described here is also causing images to lighten much less than in the past.

This seems to perfectly support my theory that color managed apps apply the profile a second time in addition to it being applied system-wide.

Anyone else experiencing this? Any idea what could I try?

---

"Sic itur ad astra per aspera."