Hey folks,

I was hoping somebody here could help me as I have just had an issue that has me at my wits end. For no apparent reason that I could tell, the brightness and contrast of my Krita just completely changed midway through my current WIP and I cannot figure out what has happened. I haven't found any setting I've accidentally activated, no keyboard commands and whilst it is no doubt some incredibly obvious problem, I am lost.

This has really gotten me flustered as rebooting etc. has done nothing to change it back and I am not going to be able to work on any of my current pieces if I can't revert whatever has happened.

The attached image shows the difference between the levels I was previously working with (the jpg) and what it has now become locked at. Any help would be gratefully appreciated!

What is the colorspace and profile in the .kra file?

RGB
16 Bits
sRGB-elle-V2-g10.icc

Is that what you meant? To note, this change has affected Krita as a whole, meaning any previously saved file I load shows the exact same change in contrast/gamma/brightness making a mess of my current stuff.

Yes, this is what I meant. You choose to work with 16 bits per channel RGB without gamma color correction. And that will give exactly this effect if you do not convert your image before loading it in another application. Check the manual for more information: https://userbase.kde.org/Krita/Manual/ColorManagement, or make sure you select a profile that has gamma correction.

Right, but what has confused me, is how this has switched. I've been working in this way (in error or not) for several months and I've not had this issue occur. I know about gamma changes when export/saving the file in another format or opening it in another program etc. and have been fixing those, but I don't understand why it has suddenly happened to everything I load into Krita itself; why have all my old/current files changed. Is it something I pressed by accident that changed the basic setting on my Krita? I've tried playing around with the colour spaces yesterday and I can't seem to get it back to the corrected gamma I was previously working with.

What I don't understand, is why this literally happened whilst I was in the middle of painting. I was just doing my usual stuff and suddenly the gamma just changed and has not gone back. I haven't even saved anything since.

Cheers for your help.

OK, I thought I had a grasp on this but I am still completely at a loss to figure out both what has happened and what changed. I thought I had a grasp on the gamma correction profiles (using srgbtrc.icc) having re-read the manual you linked earlier, but I clearly don't understand what is happening. Regardless of which profile I use, all my current and previous .kra saves, now load in with ridiculously high gamma/brightness. Regardless of how I convert the image, they all save/export in exactly the same way, with the gamma never changing.

I thought I'd found a way around it for the time being, by exporting my files as a PNG (so as to not lose detail), opening them in irfanview as that seems to auto correct the gamma, saving them and then reopening them in Krita. Of course, once these new versions are saved as a PNG and opened, they once again are auto corrected to be ridiculously dark, so it is of no use.

What has fundamentally happened that I need to resolve is that before, what used to happen is this.

The painting in Krita has the desired gamma already corrected so that it is darker that the actual palette. For instance, a colour on the colour selector will come out darker on the canvas.

The file is saved/exported and turns out too bright with high gamma.

The file is then opened in Irfanview and shows the corrected levels it had when I was working with it in Krita.



What has changed and thus made it incredibly difficult to work on current pieces, is that the exported brightness is the same as the one on the canvas. Whilst it will still show the correct levels in the file viewer once saved, I need that same environment inside Krita itself. I just don't understand why it suddenly changed having remained the same for months and how nothing I do seems to set it back to the desired levels.

I understand that the gamma is now "correct" in the sense it matches the colour selector and I would like to use this going forward, however for the current pieces I have going I need to be able to finish them with the previous settings.

To tell you exactly what is going on here, I need access to the actual .kra files, the files you export and your kritarc -- just looking at pixels showing an obvious gamma problem isn't telling me much. If an image outside krita is darker than inside krita, there are three possibilities:

* you're viewing it with a broken version of firefox
* you're viewing it with the Windows photo viewer (it has a know bug with embedded icc v4 profiles)

or

* the viewer isn't aware that image is linear gamma, or you save a linear gamma image as a png discarding the profile so the viewer couldn't even be aware of that.

It's probably option 3.

It seems that there was some issue with it remembering the colour space. I was in fact doing the right steps that you suggested earlier, but it just wouldn't save it i.e. converting the colour space didn't actually convert it and it wouldn't save the changed default colour space. After much fiddling, making new documents with a changed default colour space, rebooting etc. for whatever reason, it seems to have held on this time.

I am still completely stumped as to why it just randomly changed, but it appears to have been fixed somehow. Thank you for your help Boudewijn, I have no idea what I've done but I at least feel like I understand things a touch better.