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Hello!

A while ago I bought a wide gamut monitor and suddenly discovered how much of an issue software without color profile management can be.

I use ArtRage for painting a lot and sadly, they do 0 color profile management. (and basically can't be arsed to add it, "it'd be difficult" was their answer when I suggested it)

It's especially a problem with reference - they have their own system for storing and displaying reference images, but they're not color profiled and so the displayed colors are wrong.

I bought PR mainly for use in Photoshop, but I'd happily use it in AR as well, if it could deal with color profiles.

Is it something you'd consider implementing?

Thanks,

Jan Pospíšil

Unfortunately we don't really have the resources to implement support for this as it is quite complex. We are using the Qt framework which does not have any kind of color management support at the moment. If they would add such support in the future we could definitely use their API to expose it to our users but for now it is not something we are able to do.

Hi!, what a great program this is :). But even the sun has it's spots I guess and I'm wondering, has anything happened with/is about to regarding this issue with color profiles?

It's such an excellent program and great for drawing from, also painting but depending on which monitor (main or secondary) that I use with my Mac the colors can get quite reddish. I'm using a color-calibrator with software to get as good a match as possible and with the quick view and preview window in osx, or displaying through corel Painter or my raw converter/photoeditor the colors match better. When drawing or sculpting from PureRef it works so well, but it gets really awqward with the shift in color and saturation when trying to paint from reference and/or doing color studies.

We answered this elsewhere as well but adding the same here for discoverability:

Not much has changed unfortunately, as said above we're using Qt and this has been a requested feature over there for a while as well: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-6582

We're keeping our eyes open for news over there but we'll also see if there's any other solution we could apply if nothing happens on Qts side.

Bumping this thread to see if there's any development on Color Management for PureRef. I am using a WCG calibrated display (Around Display P3 color gamut) and experience over-saturated colors in PureRef. Without Color management settings that can keep colors within their embedded profile and default untagged images to sRGB, image RGB values basically get remapped to the monitor calibrated values and look over-saturated.

Following this topic if anything gets updated.

We've just released a beta of PureRef 2.0 that implements support for embedded color profiles. You can download it on the download page if you want to give it a go and see if it helps for your use cases!

Thank you for looking into this topic! Unfortunately, I still can't get images with other color profiles to display properly. You can try yourself by saving the red image at the top of this website below and pasting it into PureRef. If your monitor supports wide gamut, it should show a W inside the image (try opening on an iphone if it doesn't work on your computer - iphone uses DisplayP3). If your monitor or web browser forces sRGB, it only shows a uniform red square.
https://www.wide-gamut.com/test

For color management to work properly in PureRef, the user will also need to be able to select monitor profile in PureRef Settings so that a proper conversion can happen between the pictures embedded profile and the device monitor profile. It seems that currently, PureRef forces sRGB output regardless of monitor profile.

Thanks for testing and for the link! So in this case we're still limited by Qt unfortunately, but we'll keep an eye out for developments in there or if there's something else we can do in the future.

There should be color management APIs in all OS to get the device profile, but implementation is different for each OS. I would look at how it's been implemented in GIMP or Krita - they offer solid color managed workflows, are open source so you can look at the code and support cross platform.

Krita: https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/preferences/color_management_settings.html
GIMP: https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-imaging-color-management.html