Is there any way to do it at all? If not, is there any progress being made?
My laptop screen comes horribly calibrated and the only way to correct gamma is through software. I could use X11 but at this point the downsides would outweight the benefits for me.
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Any ideas here? I haven’t found anything that works
Color and gamma correction for Wayland are being worked on, with a target launch in Plasma 6. I don’t think there are any other software options right now, though.
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Is color correction still on track for Plasma 6? Thanks.
Yes, Plasma 6 will include ICC color profile support on Wayland.
Manual per-channel color adjustment like what was available in the old Gamma KCM on X11 is not yet implemented.
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Am I missing something? I have 6.3.6 no gamma options yet…
You’re not missing anything.
Is there anything we can do to move this forwards? Gamma control is one of the few remaining a11y blockers for using screens in Wayland that aren’t washed out. ICM profiles help for colour correction, but the underlying issue of no gamma control means we’re in this weird halfway house of having accurate but washed out colours.
Just do what Linux photographers do: stay out of Wayland and work in X11.
If colors are washed out, they can’t be correct. There’s nothing halfway about it, if you set the ICC profile with measurements of your display, it will work correctly.
If you don’t have such a profile, you can check out GitHub - ien646/gamma-icc: Gamma correcting ICC profiles to get one with the gamma value you want, until we have a direct UI for it.
Using Xorg would be the worst thing you could do for color accuracy. Putting aside that it’s limited to 8 bits per color in practice and only a handful of apps actually do color management on it, it’s completely unreliable.
Just looking at it wrong (time changing, suspend+wakeup, display hotplugs, opening the “gamma” KCM, opening NVidia driver settings, even playing CS:GO) drops the VCGT without telling you… How anyone ever used it for color critical things is beyond me.
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In the end I replaced by Asus VG247 with an AOC 1440p with a correctly configured built in colour profile, - the VG247QE has the correct one for 60Hz, but nothing for 144Hz. Appreciate the pointer.
If I can be bold enough to make a final query from the perspective of someone visually impaired, is gamma control not being exposed a philosophical stance, or a technical one that needs more time?
Brightness ≠Gamma. Brightness scales output intensity, while gamma reshapes mid-tones, reduces eyestrain without crushing blacks, it’s what’s actually needed more for visually impaired users in high-contrast environments.
Wayland’s security model treats gamma as “display state”, not “user preference”, which is why this got locked down so hard. I guess that’s sensible in theory, but it’s mildly hostile in practice.
I appreciate there have been some terse “stop posting/asking about this” responses, but if there isn’t going to be a user-facing option to adjust gamma, please let me know so I can just move back to X11 and use an environment that allows for gamma correction.