I’ve been using Krita for some time now, and I have been having great difficulty picking my colors in order to be rendered consistently across monitors.
I have read Krita Color Managed Worflow documentation page which contains a great deal of details (thanks for it), although, I am not able to grasp where my problem could lie…
My setting
I have two monitors, one that uses a 81C7 color profile, and another that uses a PL2237HDS color profile.
Here’s my Krita’s color space settings:
RGB/alpha
8-bit Integer/channel
sRGB-elle-V2-srgbtrc.icc
Perceptual rendering mode
I’m using Krita for Linux (AppImage) 4.2.8
The issue
My colors do not render the same brightness, saturation and hues between my two screens. This happens as well while editing in Krita, as once the images are exported…
Most of the images I found on the web do not suffer from as drastic variations between my two screens as the one I create, so I am guessing that the colors I pick in Krita are the root of my issue…
I intend to display my creation on the web only, so how do I pick a color space that will be consistently rendered on the various web users’ screens?
What I’ve tried
Changing the color profile to match one of my screens (81C7 or PL2237HDS) did not change anything: I can still see colors changing if I switch my Krita window from on monitor to another
Including or not the profile while exporting did not change neither: I’m still seeing differences from looking to my exported images (PNG as JPEG) on one monitor or on the other
Selecting another color rendering mode in Krita did not work: it always get back to Perceptual
I can pick colors that have less variations between my two monitors with a lot of trial and errors while editing, although this is a tiresome process.
P.S.: I am not sure if adding any screenshot would help, since you may not really see the same colors on your own monitor, but here’s one anyway:
The color space of the web is sRGB. To this day most browsers and devices have a hard time supporting anything else and that’s because that’s what most displays (at least try to) support. So what you need are screens calibrated for sRGB color space. You then can set it in Krita as the color space of your screen and you need to use it for your projects too.
When works look different on different screens despite the screens using the same color profile, then they are not calibrated correctly. Professional artist screens often have multiple precalibrated profiles. For example my has sRGB, AdobeRGB and Rec.709. If you want even better calibration you need to get a colorimeter to calibrate your screens yourself.
srgb-ele-RGB-srgbtrc.icc is pretty much the best sRGB profile and closer to the specifications than sRGB-Built-in, so when your screen is set to sRGB use this profile.
Thank you both for your insights. I will try to switch the color profiles of my monitors… If somebody has already done it on Ubuntu 18.04, I’m all ears.
Usually your switch the screens profile with the hardware buttons on the screen itself (but some modern screens can be set up with software too). that’s how I have to do it. If you are unlucky your screen doesn’t support proper sRGB. I have a third screen specific for gaming and I can’t get it too show colors “correctly”, no matter what I do. But for gaming the color profile is good.
What monitor models are those btw.?
I couldn’t really find anything matching “81C7”, and for “PL2237HDS”, the closest was Iiyama ProLite E2273HDS, which is a cheap TN panel, so you couldn’t ever expect accurate colors from that.
Anyway, with which application do you compare the images on the different monitors?
Do they even support color management?
For example, Firefox is stilly pretty bad at it, by default it doesn’t even enable ICC V4 support, treats untagged images as “does not need color management” and even if you setup everything, it’ll still tends to show colors quite differently than Krita, Chrome(ium) etc. (I couldn’t get it to show any non-sRGB AVIF correctly for example).
Oh and for applications to actually know about your monitor profiles without manual intervention, you need to setup colord.
This one. Good to know (I bought it second hand, didn’t even check the reviews…). 81C7 is my Lenovo Ideapad 720 integrated screen, probably not the sharpest tool in the shed neither.
Tried both Ubuntu Image Viewer, Mozilla Firefox and Krita. Display is more consistent between those three apps than between both of my screens.
Interesting, I will check for that.
By the way, I’m very satisfied with the quickness and quality of answers on these forums. Thank you very much everyone!
I see…while I don’t know this specific monitor, I recently had to use a BenQ TN monitor for a few days when my trusty Eizo monitor died (after 8 years or so), and it was just impossible to do graphics.
While yours may be not as extremely bad, the TN technology is just inherently more viewing angle dependent, especially vertically. So the brightness/contrast/saturation at the top will never really match the bottom of the screen.
We use special screens that have a good factory calibration for sRGB (or the color space we need), use a colorimeter to calibrate them and then hope for the best for other people. Since we have no control over the screens of everyone else we can only hope they support the color range of sRGB because that’s in theory the lowest common denominator everyone agreed on.
Colors can look different on different devices because of eye-care software, too. Like blue light reduction or that thing where displays change colors depending on day time.
So the best you can do as an artist is to control that everything is correct on your side so that everyone else at least has a good base image for whatever their device is doing.
Yeah I bought 2 ips monitors of the same brand, model and year to solve that issue.
So out of the box they display the same so calibrating one will have the exact settings for the other. Every year brands redo the monitors even if they are of the same model making them possibly different in how they calibrate.
Thing is cheap monitors give crappy displays as they eat colors by banding light and dark colors I never noticed it before.
