I know this has been asked a million times before, but nothing is actually working.
I use a Mac with a retina display. The color profile is “Color LCD,” which isn’t an option in Krita, so I tried digging up my Mac’s color profile itself (Macintosh HD > Library > ColorSync > Profiles > Displays) and importing it using Krita’s “import profile” button, but nothing happened—the profile is still set to sRGB-elle-V2-srgbtcc.icc and there’s no new option in the list.
Then I tried setting both my computer’s profile and Krita’s to Display P3, as recommended elsewhere. Everything else on my screen looks the same as it did, but Krita looks washed-out, exactly like I don’t want. The export now matches the canvas, but the canvas is no longer capable of producing the vivid red I was trying to preserve in the first place.
I know for a fact that the saturated colors I see when using the default sRGB profile can be stored in a PNG, because I can screenshot the canvas just fine. So how in the world do I export an image containing them?
If you’re applying a display profile on the OS level, you shouldn’t apply that again in Krita - the profile will get applied twice before your image is displayed on your screen and things will look wrong.
Is there an issue if you set Krita’s display profile to the defailt sRGB profile?
Yes. Like many others, I get washed-out colors when I export. All the successful solutions I’ve seen involved setting the OS and Krita to the same profile.
What are you using to view your exported images? It might be the image viewer that’s at fault. Do the images look OK in a web browser, for example?
I export sRGB images as JPG without embedding ICC profiles, and they always look a little dull in the default image viewer for Linux Mint, but look fine elsewhere. Not sure what’s going on there…
No, they look the same in my browser or when I upload them, including when I export the way you just said. I do most of my viewing in Preview, the same app that shows the screenshots just fine.
I’m not sure what most of the export options mean, so if there’s a combo I should be using for the best chance let me know, but none of my toying around has yielded any change.
OK, first of all, I realized we don’t know one of the most important things - what colorspace and bit depth is your document in? If it’s in, for example, 16-bit, then the exports will look washed out unless you convert to 8-bit before exporting.
I wonder if we could get some more hints from the posts you mentioned earlier. Would you have one or two we could look at? I’m unable to replicate the problem (maybe because I’m on Windows?).
You said “like many others I get washed out colors…”
I thought if we looked at those posts there might be a hint for us somewhere within those threads.
I just found this super-old article. It points to a problem with retina and HiDPI. That made me wonder about the HiDPI setting inside Configure Krita. Have you played with that?
I just watched the video (the first item you linked) where he changed the setting within Krita to P3. Then he had to adjust the krita document to return it to its original brilliance before doing the second export. Is that how you did it? You changed to P3 then you adjusted the colour in your document before testing the png output?
Sorry for all these questions but since I can’t replicate the problem, I can’t try these things out myself.
Of course not, that tutorial isn’t helpful at all because I don’t want to change my art after I’ve made it, nor can I increase the saturation when it’s already at maximum. I assume P3 is also the native color space on his monitor. It’s just an example of someone having the same problem.
What if you tried this - not with your real artwork - but with a simple rectangle filled with vivid red. Try a variety of colour profiles one by one. Super tedious but maybe you might hit on the right combo?
I’m sure you can tell I’m not a colour expert. Just trying to help.
