Provide a workflow for calibrating scanners and color-managed scanning (and printing?)
Presumably this is the place where high-level ideas related to the new FreeDesktop color management effort are tracked; I didn't see anything about color calibrated workflows for scanning, so here goes...
In recent years, getting color-accurate scans for documents and printed photographs has been extremely confusing, or nearly impossible, even if you buy printed calibration targets. From what I can see with my research so far (see below), it seems things have been in a state of disrepair and incomplete implementations, presumably in anticipation for creating a better Wayland-only architecture. It would be really nice indeed if the color management unification effort in Wayland could solve this once and for all, i.e. take scanning (and presumably printing?) into account too, not just monitors displays rendering.
Prior art and presumably relevant things I was able to find:
- GNOME's user manual has two pages related to this:
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ArchWiki's page on ICC profiles made me discover:
- The fact that XSane (and thus presumably SANE?) supports ICC profiles
- This random blog post/guide on Color Management on Linux for scanning, which was surprisingly insightful to me.
- @uraeus's blog post from December 2022 mentions that "Mutter is now in charge of ICC profile handling and we’re planning to deprecate the old colord daemon.", but what about calibration tooling, is that going to be GNOME Color Manager again in the future?…
- …and yet, 4 years ago, calibration support was entirely killed off in GNOME Color Manager.
- The UI in GNOME Settings (Control Center) did not reflect GCM's (temporary?) deprecation, it's essentially a set of loose dangling wires now: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/951 ; is it meant to be reimplemented in GCM and reconnected in GNOME Settings eventually?
What are the plans to make this work again in a Wayland world with the various daemons/backends/middleware changes that occurred in recent years, and will apps like Simple Scan also still need to implement ICC profiles support themselves like XSane did a long time ago?
P.s.: I care mainly about scanning because I don't actually print photos myself, but presumably the concept of color management for printers might go hand-in-hand with this, too. Or maybe printers are just expected to spit out correct colors on their own, as long as you designed your documents with color-calibrated displays (i.e. you can trust what you can see)?