Many printing houses have their own device profiles for their printers, or may prefer doing color conversion themselves. Device spaces are also why you should first consult with your printer what profile they expect. You set these in Krita’s color management tab.īy default we assume sRGB for screens, but it’s very likely that your screen isn’t exactly fitting sRGB, especially if you have a high quality screen, where it may be a bigger space instead. Using these and several other measurements it creates an ICC profile unique to your screen. This device, in combination with the right software, measures the strongest red, green and blue your screen can produce, as well as the white, black and gray it produces. Within both we can identify the following color spaces: Device spacesĭevice spaces are those describing your monitor, and have to be made using a little device that is called “colorimeter”. To give a crude estimate, ICC profiles deal with keeping colors consistent over many interpretations of devices (screens, printers) by using a reference space, and OCIO deals with manipulating the interpretation of said colors. On the one hand, we have lcms2, which deal with ICC profiles, and on the other, we have OCIO, which deal with LUT color management. Krita has two systems dedicated to color management. XYZ is a coordinate system that has a spot for all colors that the average human eye can see.įrom XYZ it can then be translated back into another device space, such as RGB (for screens), or CMYK (for printers). It usually works by attempting to convert a color to the reference color space XYZ. What is color management? ¶Ĭolor management is, dryly put, a set of systems that tries to have the same color translate properly between color devices. However, imagine that something like this happened at a printing company? Imagine four printers printing the same magazine with wildly different results? That would be disastrous!įor this purpose, we invented color management. Now, these are kindergarteners, so this isn’t the largest problem in the world. Their colors probably look like what you imagined. They didn’t mix their green, and thus ended up with a purer color.įinally, group 4 has vermillion red, citron yellow and cerulean blue. Group 3 had vermillion red, citron yellow, emerald green and cerulean blue. However, their green looks nice because cerulean is a much lighter blue. Magenta is a type of red that is closer to pink, opposed to vermillion, which is closer to orange. Group 2 had magenta red, citron yellow and cerulean blue. This is because ultramarine is too dark of a blue to create nice greens with. This means their triangle looks nice and red, but their circle’s green is muddy. Group 1 had vermillion red, citron yellow and ultramarine blue to their disposal. The following results come from painting:Įven though all groups had the same assignment, each group’s result looks different. The kids are very experienced with painting already, so the teacher can confidently leave the smarter ones to their own devices, and spent more time on those who need help. The teacher gives them a painting assignment: They need to paint a red triangle, a blue square, a green circle and put a yellow border around the three. The class of 28 children is subdivided in groups of 7. To explain the point of color management, you’d first need to learn which problem color management tries to solve. Maybe, after reading this, you may feel like changing the default, to get new and interesting results from filters, blending modes, or just the color smudge brush. We’ll go into what these terms mean in the theory, but if you’re here only for trying to figure out which is the default, you now know it. With the new color space browser this profile is marked with (default) when using 8bit. This means you can choose for sRGB built-in or sRGB-elle-v2-srgbtrc.icc. If you’ve never worked with color management before, and have no clue what it is, then know that you’ve probably been working in the 8bit RGB color space with the sRGB profile. Color management is pretty useful for people who work in digital imaging professionally, and hopefully this page will explain why. Or maybe you just wondered what all these ‘color model’ and ‘color profile’ things you can find in the menus mean. You may have heard that Krita has something called color-management.