Colour profiles support

[ygoe]

Hello,

 

My new Lenovo laptop with a wide-gamut "100% DCI-P3" display is kind of annoying to use with Windows 11. Nothing except a handful of special applications seem to be aware of colour profiles. Why are such displays even manufactured if they're incompatible with 98% of all software, including the Windows desktop itself?

 

To try and improve things bit by bit, I'd like to ask for the status of colour profiles in paint.net. I know that I can one-way apply an embedded profile to the image pixels. This cannot be undone when saving the image, and it certainly won't help if no profile was embedded in the first place. Even if we assume sRGB then, the colours still look wild on screen. I might need to fully replace paint.net with Affinity Photo even for the simplest tasks where I liked to use it before.

 

So, are there any plans to add colour management to paint.net? A first step would be to apply the selected display profile only for displaying, but keep the original pixels when saving. Next would be saving images with a specific profile and convert pixels between profiles. Of course, any embedded profile would always need to be considered from the start. "Applying" it has no real use in this colour-managed world. But I see that profile calculations already seem to be there.

[Rick Brewster]

Color profile support is more a matter of UI/UX and feature prioritization than technology at this point. Paint.NET can read and write the profiles, it can even use them with Direct2D to do on-the-fly color correction using the GPU, it's very fast, and if I set up the swapchain correctly it'll even do >8-bit display output. I don't have a good idea on when this will happen, but I do want it.

[Rick Brewster]

The other thing that was preventing this, earlier in the year when I looked into it, was that the necessary Win32 APIs for getting the system color profiles (including the profile for the display) were not available in TerraFX.Interop.Windows. This has since been remedied https://github.com/terrafx/terrafx.interop.windows/issues/350

[Rick Brewster]

This is going to be included in v5.1. I also have a Lenovo laptop (P16 Gen 1) with a calibrated HDR DCI-P3 screen etc.

 

More details ... when I'm ready 😂 There's actually a ton of things that have to be reconsidered when color management is added. 

 

[BoltBait]

@Rick Brewster will you be able to select your printer's color profile so you can see an approximation of what your colors will look like when printed?

 

My color laser printer will probably look pretty good, but what about my kid's inkjet printer? I image it will look pretty washed out.

 

[Rick Brewster]

I'm not planning on "soft proofing" support, but it's not out of the question for later. Also, printing support in Paint.NET is ... not great. I'm not even sure if I can send along the color profile to the print wizard thingy.

[null54]

10 hours ago, BoltBait said:

will you be able to select your printer's color profile so you can see an approximation of what your colors will look like when printed?

 

I wrote an effect that implements "soft proofing" using LittleCMS:

I probably need to update it for the new features in 5.0, it was written for 4.0.x.

[ygoe]

Thanks for the updates. It's great to see the progress here.

 

Meanwhile I found an option in the AMD Software that magically reduces the display colours to sRGB and I could calibrate them to be more exact (mostly shifted the white point which was still too warm). That option isn't nearly labelled as what it does and it seems to be undocumented. Yet it's there and solves my problem in the first place.

[Rick Brewster]

5 hours ago, ygoe said:

Thanks for the updates. It's great to see the progress here.

 

Meanwhile I found an option in the AMD Software that magically reduces the display colours to sRGB and I could calibrate them to be more exact (mostly shifted the white point which was still too warm). That option isn't nearly labelled as what it does and it seems to be undocumented. Yet it's there and solves my problem in the first place.

 

It'll be important to have people who know about color management and color profiles, or at least have an interest in using them, to test the v5.1 beta when it comes out.

 

So make sure to enable this in the Settings. Once you see an update for 5.1 pop up, you'll know you can start trying out the color management/profile stuff. (I don't know yet when it'll be available -- probably not until 2024)