I don’t know how many of you are reading Planet GNOME, but I bet not too many. 😛 That’s why I’d like to draw your attention to this blogpost by Richard Hughes.

Color management is present in all modern operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and Apple OS-X, as well as GNOME has support for it since 3.0 (AFAIK).

Having color management on machines used for creative tasks (like painting/photography, etc.), is very important, because the human eye can only capture a certain range of colours as well as digital devices can only produce/display a specific range of colours. So you have different colour-spaces between devices, your printer, your screen, your camera:

When the graphics are processed by devices using different colour-spaces, you get results like this:

To keep the “genuine” colours of graphics while processing it, ICC profiles are used to translate between different colour-spaces. ICC is an ISO standard and used in many (all?) operating systems. It is supported by most image-processing devices.

colord now is (as you might guess from the name) a D-Bus activated system daemon to manage, install and generate color profiles to accurately colour manage input and output devices. colord is a Freedesktop.org project and therefore not tied to GNOME or any other desktop. But at the moment, only GNOME provides support for colord in it’s settings panel, so integration in KDE is wanted :). Richard Hughes, the author of colord, offers is help when someone wants to write a KCM for colord, which would be great to get full colour-management support on KDE too. Working with Richard is great, I am working with him on the PackageKit project, which really is a pleasure. 🙂 You just need to make very clear, why a certain bigger change is required and what the benefits are. (but that’s a good aspect for project maintainers, IMHO)

Unfortunately I am very busy with Listaller, PackageKit/Apper/Debian-DEP-11 and university stuff at the moment, so I can’t do much for this task. But of course I’d be willing to help a little, if I can, if someone would like to take this task. 🙂

P.S: If you find it weird that I first write about making System Settings easy to use and then ask for another KCM: The System Settings project hasn’t finished with the last blogpost, I’m already planning some stuff based on the comments on the last post. 🙂 I’ll write about it soon. (But as always, the critical factor is time…)

EDIT240212/12:24: Do be fair, I want to mention that there already is a “color-management” module, called Oryanos. At time, it looks like nobody makes use of it, although it has already been around for years. colord, in contrast, is already used by a wide variety of other tools and libraries, for example CUPS and GTK+. To be honest, I cannot really judge which technology is better, but I can see that the adoption of colord is far greater, while colord is the younger project. This means that colord seems to provide the necessary components, is functional & stable.

There is a FAQ-Document available, describing why colord was created instead of fixing Oryanos, it’s very interesting to read and describes nicely why colord is preferred.

This post was planned to be just a hint for interested people to see that the colord project is looking for KDE developers (there are already a few who are interested), but it looks like I ran directly into the colord vs. Oryanos crossfire. 😛

I don’t know how many of you are reading Planet GNOME, but I bet not too many. 😛 That’s why I’d like to draw your attention to this blogpost by...