How to change screen saturation?

[Hal V. Engel]

On Sunday, January 02, 2011 01:02:37 pm Alberto Gonzalez wrote:
> On Sunday 02 January 2011 21:16:01 Hal V. Engel wrote:
> > Because the monitor has a large gamut you will get higher than normal
> > saturation unless you color manage the display system wide (IE. not just
> > in CM aware software).  The reason that this is happening is that
> > currently most software other than a few color management aware apps
> > (GIMP, Scribus, CinePaint...) is assuming that displays have approx.
> > sRGB characteristics (IE. gamut, primaries, gamma and so on) but your
> > monitor is near AdobeRGB in gamut and likely has primaries that are
> > significantly different from sRGB and that assumption fails apart under
> > those conditions.
> 
> Ah, yes, you are right. I thought about this, but because The GIMP also
> showed the saturation I discarded it. However, it's because I needed to
> actually feed it with an ICC profile. Once I did it, pictures in it show
> correct colors.
> 
> > If you are using  compiz there is a CM plug-in named Compicc (see
> > http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/compicc/index.php?title=Main_Page)
> > available that will allow you to color manage your display system wide.
> > But to really use this correctly you will need to create (or get if one
> > is available) an ICC profile specific to your monitor(s).
> 
> I'm using Kwin now, but I seem to remember reading about some way of using
> monitor color profiles in Linux via xorg. I'll investigate that option and
> if it fails I'll take your suggestion and use Compiz with that plugin.
> 
> Thank you very much for the hint!
> Alberto

Currently the only way to use icc profiles system wide is to use the compiz 
plug-in.  X11 does not have direct support for color management other than 
allowing for setting of ICC_PROFILE atoms for monitors.  There have been a 
number of threads about this on the list over the last few years.

My understanding is that compiz plays nice with newer versions of KDE but I 
have not tested this.

The plug-in requires that the xorg ICC_PROFILE atoms be set for each monitor.  
Currently the only apps that support this on KDE are oyranos (command line), 
kolor-manager (in KDE svn playground but currently needs work. It is a 
settings module that provides a nice GUI for oyranos in KDE4) and ArgyllCMS 
(command-line).  For gnome users there is gnome color manager.

Hal