I have a very weird issue with color management, and I just can't even wrap my head around what the hell is going on and why. I'm hoping maybe you can help me understand the nature of this problem and maybe even troubleshoot.

I calibrated my screen using DisplayCAL ( http://displaycal.net/ ) which uses Argyll CMS. It's all fine, colors are great. I paint in Krita which is set to default "sRGB builtin", and what I see in Krita is exactly what I'll see in non-color managed apps such as Firefox.

However, in color managed apps, such as ShowPhoto or Gwenview the image will look much lighter and noisier, with lots of banding and artifacts. The same happens in Krita if I set Krita to use "system monitor profile" which in theory would be the desired setting. If I turn off color managing in ShowPhoto, it will look correct as well.

Screenshot: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/h3wis99sq8xlaek/Screenshot_20170319_000934.png

I showed the image to other people and they seem to see the darker, non-noisy version on their systems.

So, my monitor profile is set in the KDE System Settings globally, which is fine since otherwise everything would be badly tinted. My theory is that what happens is that for whatever reason color managed apps apply their own color management on top of the system wide profile instead replacing it when drawing the images.


Any idea if my theory is correct, and about how can I fix this?

I don't know if this is a bug and I should make a report, or it's some incorrect settings on my end, or maybe something else.

Aaand the issue is back.

It's essentially the same as before: 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 adn 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.

I noticed over a month ago that this wasn't a problem anymore (no idea when it was fixed) so I set Krita to use monitor profiles and it worked as expected. Then after upgrading my system today (last upgrade was 1-2 weeks ago), the issue re-appeared.

EDIT: I don't know if the issue is in DKE itself or Arch, so I posted in both places. Arch thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php ... 1#p1921361

Could you please provide a screenshot that is actually accessible? Imgur is probably a better choice than Dropbox...

It's this way for me too with Gwenview and some other apps. Digikam and Darktable are fine.

The screenshots below show the same photo in Gwenview on the left and Showfoto (Digikam) on the right. Notice the over-saturated greens.

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.

I think it's either this, or the colour-managed application is using the profile from the wrong screen.

See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401154

Actually it looks like this is already being worked on:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401154

kde-cfeck wrote:See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401154

Oh, just noticed you got there first, I should have refreshed the page