After playing with Gimp 2.4's automagic white balance correction and then wondering about how realistic the colours on my monitor were, I was having a look at colour profile management in Linux tonight.

I knew about XICC, which sets the per monitor colour profile that applications can utilise, but of course this needs an ICC file. Argyll CMS can generate an ICC profile if you have one of those fancy colourimeters, but how do you generate a rough profile without one? I had a look at LPROF, but I could not figure out how it works.

It seems to me that with a significant number of GNOMEy apps supporting colour profiles via XICC (Firefox 3, Eye of GNOME, Gimp, Inkscape), that it would be really awesome for GNOME to provide some colour profile support. I figure this would have two parts. Firstly, a management tool that stored ICC profile files and allowed you set a colour profile for a monitor (combined with gnome-settings-daemon loading these profiles on startup). Secondly a colour calibration tool. This would primarily be a tool for amateurs who wanted rough colour calibration, but didn't want to go out and purchase a calibration device (i.e. me). Support for colourimeters would be nice, but in my opinion, a secondary concern.

To provide a reference, I've taken some screenshots of how the colour calibration ("expert mode") works in MacOSX.

Colours are something that I practically know nothing about, I don't understand why each of the 5 calibration dialogs is important or why they work or what they're setting, but I think this sort of clear, pedagogic calibration system, combined with some profile management (perhaps in a new XRandR enabled monitor setup dialog page) is what's needed, and would be a really awesome addition to GNOME.