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Open Source Color Management Is Broken

lieberbiber.de

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Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#71

Post by seba_dos1 »

coldtea wrote: post #52
userbinator wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mapping directly into the full gamut of the monitor, the way that almost every common computer did before the whole "color management" stuff even became a thing. Anyone should strive to have as accurate colors as possible. No, people have different needs and set their monitors' brightness and contrast accordingly. It's only the mentioned industries which require that accuracy --- and the associated, often very expens…

> No, people have different needs and set their monitors' brightness and contrast accordingly. It's only the mentioned industries which require that accuracy --- and the associated, often very expensive, monitors and calibration equipment. Except for accessibility reasons (e.g. high contrast for the visually impaired), there are no "different needs" that dictate that people should see colors rendered falsely compared…

Well, that's not true, and any user of f.lux/Redshift/Twilight will probably agree with me on that one.

Or, any user of audio equalizer set to a genre preset.

While I understand what you mean (having the screen properly calibrated out of the box would sure be nice), you might be using too strong words to express it :)

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#72

Post by kuschku »

GhostVII wrote: post #57
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does “unmanaged” even mean? Anyone should strive to have as accurate colors as possible.

> Anyone should strive to have as accurate colors as possible Why is that? I like to have my monitors with a bit of a warmer colour balance, since it is nicer on my eyes, and I have no need for 100% colour reproduction. I think that everyone should strive for the most comfortable colours as long as they aren't doing photo editing or something.

You can always add an additional transform on top, to provide such warm colors.

But this should be explicit, and the software should know about it.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#73

Post by seba_dos1 »

hughsient wrote: post #61
seba_dos1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand that attitude, that's a pretty low price for a niche open hardware device.

It's barely more than the device costs to make. It turns out making batches of 50 at a time is an order of magnitude more expensive than building them 50,000 at a time. Source: Am the person that sits in a shed and builds each ColorHug.

Just what I suspected :) Thanks for doing it anyway!

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#74

Post by bleair »

coldtea wrote: post #49
AboutTheWhisles wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every large visual effects studio runs on linux, with hundreds of linux workstations at each one. Color sensitive work like lighting and compositing has been done for well over a decade on linux. Artist workstations are calibrated and every major computer graphics application has support for look up tables.

> Every large visual effects studio runs on linux, with hundreds of linux workstations at each one. Color sensitive work like lighting and compositing has been done for well over a decade on linux. That's for rendering, where the OS and Desktop experience doesn't really matter, and the cheaper it is the better. Few pros do the actual editing and color work (where the decisions are made, not the rendering part) on Lin…

I think we might have a different definition of "Few pros do ... color work.. on Linux". Have you worked at Sony, Company 3, Dreamworks, Lucasfilm, Pixar, or Deluxe?

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#75

Post by frabbit »

giovannicarruba wrote: post #31
frabbit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also that only GNOME appears to have color management. XFCE and KDE seem to be lacking in that regard.

It appears that KDE could do much better without any actual effort. Just merge the existing code into the base packages like GNOME did, don't make it optional.

That would be one positive thing that could come out of this criticism.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#76

Post by jzl »

The complaints in this article appear to be regarding OS-controlled lut adjustments, i.e. via special X11 features. I've used color calibrated monitors on linux in color-sensitive industries with hundreds or even thousands of artist seats (including film, animation, vfx, real-time, etc.) and the monitor has always been calibrated via the physical menus/buttons on the bezel and not a software/OS monitor-specific lut adjustment.

I'm not judging which is better or worse as it would indeed be nice if the calibration could be controlled by the OS. I'm just saying that adjusting the monitor hardware directly is what's being done in the pro linux content creation world. Also, I imagine that certain brightness and color gamut controls could only happen from the bezel controls. Dreamcolors can switch between srgb & P3 for example.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#77

Post by softwarelimits »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #59
coldtea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every large visual effects studio runs on linux, with hundreds of linux workstations at each one. Color sensitive work like lighting and compositing has been done for well over a decade on linux. That's for rendering, where the OS and Desktop experience doesn't really matter, and the cheaper it is the better. Few pros do the actual editing and color work (where the decisions are made, not the rendering part) on Lin…

This is just not true, you're spreading misinformation. I am a colorist, I'm the person making these final decisions. Every single high end color suite I've ever been in runs Linux. In fact, the full version of Baselight (one of the defacto color correction suites) only runs on Linux. DaVinci Resolve (one of the other major ones) ran only on Linux for the majority of it's existence and the full panel version (the pro…

I am really very interested in reading about a typical hardware and software setup for a Linux colorist workstation with a special focus on which graphics card and which drivers to use! Nvidia?

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#78

Post by Arelius »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #59
coldtea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every large visual effects studio runs on linux, with hundreds of linux workstations at each one. Color sensitive work like lighting and compositing has been done for well over a decade on linux. That's for rendering, where the OS and Desktop experience doesn't really matter, and the cheaper it is the better. Few pros do the actual editing and color work (where the decisions are made, not the rendering part) on Lin…

This is just not true, you're spreading misinformation. I am a colorist, I'm the person making these final decisions. Every single high end color suite I've ever been in runs Linux. In fact, the full version of Baselight (one of the defacto color correction suites) only runs on Linux. DaVinci Resolve (one of the other major ones) ran only on Linux for the majority of it's existence and the full panel version (the pro…

I'd like to confirm that ILM also does color work in Linux.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#79

Post by newnewpdro »

It's unclear to me why there's no color palette/correction table exposed in libdrm/KMS at the kernel. It should just be part of the video mode, maybe with a bit to indicate when the driver/hardware doesn't support changing it. But always be able to read it out, make it linear nonsense when the support isn't there - that won't be worse than what we have now.

Then the layers up the stack like Wayland/X/GNOME/KDE are just messengers to/from the bottom @ drm.

We also need floating point frame buffers to be first-class citizens at the KMS level. I don't want to be forced into OpenGL/Vulkan just to be able to have the hardware apply gamma correction on a software-rendered frame buffer, and if I have the hardware do color correction, it kind of needs the HDR of floats - not uchars, which I don't think libdrm supports with dumb buffers of today. If not floats, at least more bits than 8 per color component.

Programs like Plymouth or other embedded style applications running directly on libdrm should be able to have color-corrected output without needing bespoke software implementations and their own calibration tables. I should be able to tell the kernel the correction table, maybe compile it in, or another payload on the boot parameters cmdline.

Hell there are fairly well-known simple algorithms for generating approximate color tables from a single gamma value. If I only want to make things look "better" in my linux kiosk, and care not about absolute color correctness, let me stick a drm.gamma=.55 field on the kernel commandline to generate the correction table in lieu of a full calibrated table.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#80

Post by foepys »

danceparty wrote: post #66
Bitcoin_McPonzi wrote: post #32

Many of my (Hollywood) clients need to do color grading and other accurate color work. What platforms do they all use? Not Macintosh, despite its reputation for being the platform for "graphics professionals" (it was missing 10 bit/channel color until very recently). And not Linux, despite its use in render farms. They use Windows 10 and HP DreamColor monitors. That's the only platform that works and works well for p…

I don't agree, the entire visual effects industry, including their color departments, run on linux. Baselight and Resolve, are the two most common color correction programs in the industry, baselight exclusively runs on linux, and the big color companies (company 3, efilm, technicolor) all run resolve on linux. Coloring is done either on projectors, or broadcast monitors (something like a sony PVMA250 on the low end…

Do you by any chance have some links where I can read more about Linux as a front-end system in the film/graphics industry? This is field of work in which I would never have guessed Linux to be strong.
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