On OpenICC’s download area (edited on 16. February) on SourceForge is now a CD Live media available for 64-bit computers. It contains many colour management tools as available from openSUSE’s Build Service.
* littleCMS - widely used colour converter
* ArgyllCMS -1.3.0, dispcalGUI - cross platform colour management
* Oyranos - colour management system
* Compiz ICC colour server - or short CompIcc
* kolor manager - in KDE’s system settings panel
* ICC Examin - profile viewer
* Xcm/QCmsEvents - Xorg colour management event observer
* CinePaint - with net-color and other patches
* Scribus 1.3.8 - Layoutprogramm
* Cmyktool, Photoprint - imaging software
* SampleICC, IccXML - ICC sample implementation
* Nouveau/radeonhd + Mesa 3D drivers (edited 16. February)
… and more.
The CD should start on not too old nvidia graphics card hardware. Other systems are currently not support due to the requirement of a stable OpenGL driver with GPU Shader support for Compiz and CompIcc.
Once the live media runs, the desktop should appear colour managed. The trayicon, with the little horse shoe in it, should be coloured to show the colour server is correcting the the desktop. CompIcc is colour managing each monitor separately and acts on hotplug appropriately. Currently is no monitor ICC profile pre installed on the CD. So it must be generated on the fly. The colorimetry data comes from the monitor itself and contains the colour primaries, a white point and a single gamma value. This is enough to let strange primaries appear more natural, or detect a wide gamut monitor and compensate for its possibly very strong saturation.
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kolor-manager device profile selection |
To change the monitor profile one can use kolor-manager from KDE’s systemsettings panel. It contains as well policies and default profile selection. These settings are stored in a per user database. To see that CompIcc is working one might select the CIE*XYZ profile, with its headroom and gamma of 1.0 the monitor appearance should change dramatically. But thats only visible when the “Show only device related ICC profiles” box is deactivated.
On the desktop are three example images just for having some wide gamut media available. The two tiff files are raw camera developed images with a custom ICC profile assigned. The restaurant JPEG is in AdobeRGB as typical for some cameras. All are tagged with the respective profiles and can be loaded into the installed image tools. PhotoPrint is a very sensible application and Scribus of course. To show the whole image gamut on a wide gamut monitor only CinePaint can communicate with CompIcc to get a own hole in the screen to colour correct to the native screen colours. All other applications see sRGB as monitor colour space. Thats visible by again assigning a CIE*XYZ while CinePaint has opened a image. It will not be affected as it does not check monitor profile switching.
The advantages of complete desktop colour correct are:
* wallpapers and movies look like indented
* shopping via internet is more reliable colour wise
* content on different brand of monitor look more uniform
* wide gamut displays become useable
* non colour managed applications fall back reasonable to sRGB
Hope you can start the media. For ATI cards one further version is planed and maybe for other cards, like intel graphics, a separate version can follow.