Linux Color Management

Linux color management has the same goal as the color management systems (CMS) for other operating systems: to achieve the best possible color reproduction throughout an imaging workflow from its source (camera, video, scanner, etc.), through imaging software (CinePaint, Digikam, GIMP, Krita, Scribus, etc.), and finally onto an output medium (monitor, video projector, printer, etc.). In particular, color management attempts to support WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) on-screen previewing (soft-proofing) ability for color work such as retouching prior to printing. Note that in practice, best is determined according to some algorithm and may not correspond well to what a human eye would consider best.

Linux color management relies on the use of accurate International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles describing the behavior of devices such as digital cameras, monitors or printers, and color-managed applications that are aware of these profiles. These applications perform gamut conversions between device profiles and color spaces. Gamut conversions, based on accurate device profiles, are the essence of color management.

Historically, color management was not an initial design consideration of the X11 display system on which much of Linux graphics support rests, and thus color managed workflows have been somewhat more challenging to implement on Linux than under OS's such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. This situation is now being progressively remedied, however it must be admitted that color management under Linux, while functional, has not yet acquired mature status. Although it is now possible to obtain a very consistent color management workflow under Linux, certain problems still remain:

• The absence of a central user control panel for color settings.
• Many hardware devices for color calibration lack drivers and proper supporting software on Linux.
• Some necessary software such as LUT loaders can seldom be found in the package repositories of even the major Linux distributions.

Since ICC color profiles are written to an open specification, they are compatible across OS's. Hence, a profile produced on a specific OS should work on any other OS given the availability of the necessary software to read it and perform the gamut conversions. This can be used as a workaround for the lack of support for certain spectrophotometers or colorimeters under Linux: one can simply produce a profile on a different OS and then use it in a Linux workflow. Additionally, certain hardware, such as most printers and certain monitors, can be calibrated under another OS and then used in a fully color-managed workflow on Linux.

The popular Ubuntu Linux distribution added initial colour management in the 11.10 release (the "Oneiric Ocelot" release).