An update on HDR and color management in KWin
In my last post about HDR and color management I explained roughly how color management works, what we’re doing to make it work on Wayland and how far along we were with that in Plasma. That’s more than half a year ago now, so let’s take a look at what changed since then!
KWin now supports ICC profiles: In display settings you can set one for each screen, and KWin will use that to adjust the colors accordingly.
Applications are still limited to sRGB for now. For Wayland native applications, a color management protocol is required to change that, so that apps can know about the colorspaces they can use, and so that KWin can know which colorspace their windows are actually using, and the upstream color management protocol for that is still not done yet. It’s getting close though! For example I have an implementation for it in a KWin branch, and Victoria Brekenfeld from System76 implemented a Vulkan layer using the protocol to allow applications to use the VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace and VK_EXT_hdr_metadata Vulkan extensions, which can be used to run some applications and games with non-sRGB colorspaces.
Update
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HDR support for KDE Plasma 6 seems to be shaping up nicely
While it's far from finished, and still needs some manual effort to get properly working, HDR support for KDE Plasma 6 has made great progress. While HDR is already available in SteamOS on Steam Deck, getting it hooked up on traditional Linux desktops is still in-progress.