[GSoC] KWin colour management

[Casian Andrei]

Thank you for all this feedback!

Meanwhile I have been documenting myself and looking into relevant
code (and following this thread). I can't argue on the complex
technical issues and decisions.

2012/3/20 Martin Graesslin <mgraesslin at kde.org>:
> There is more into it: first of all KWin currently does not distinguish between
> screens during rendering. To properly have screen aware color correction the
> complete compositor has to be made screen aware. The repaint loop has to be
> split into multiple rendering passes - one for each screen. This is quite a
> change in the way how KWin renders, but might be a useful change.
Okay, this would involve complicated changes, consequently it should
be like a separate sub-project. At the moment I don't know well enough
how KWin renders from my limited current understanding of the code,
but there will be enough time to discuss and see how this could be
done. It is good if this change is possible without massive intrusive
modifications throughout KWin.

>
> As a second step all fragment shaders need to be adjusted to do the color
> correction. This has to be done extremely efficient. This is a rather critical
> code path especially for low-end hardware (think of old Intel GPUs). Given the
> constraints of the GPUs a dynamic feature activation is not possible.
I have a rather crazy idea about how to achieve this for *all* of the
fragment shaders without modifying each one. It might be a silly idea,
but it's worth proposing it.

Every one of these fragment shaders respect the following structure:
1. declarations, functions, uniforms, whatever
2. void main() {
3. fragment shader functionality (whatever the shader does)
4. gl_FragColor = some_expression
5. } // closing bracket, end of shader

Now, colour correction would require this gl_FragColor result to be
different, to be altered. If I understand the shader assembly thing in
CompICC, it would be an alpha demultiply, a 3d texture lookup to
correct the color, and an alpha remultiply. Let's assume this code is
kept in a GLSL function, namely "vec4 correctColor(vec4 c)". This
function will require a sampler3D.

To make the above code do the color correction, we need to do the following:
* insert the sampler3D declaration and the function definition just
before main()
* alter gl_FragColor = some_expression --> gl_FragColor =
correctColor(some_expression)

These alterations are not *that* complicated, and they shouldn't
introduce any strange instabilities. Similar, but simpler alterations
are already made in GLShader::compile() at kwinglutils.cpp around line
295. Colour correction could be easily disabled at this point.

The tricky part is how to know what window / screen we're compiling
the shader for. This can be done with some little complications, maybe
an extra parameter, or some kind of member for GLShader, or some evil
static variable / member.

The advantage is that it avoids modifying all the fragment shaders
everywhere, but it brings these (i hope slight) complications to
GLShader. What do you think about this?

Oh, and what does "dynamic feature activation" mean? If it means what
I think it means, then it can be handled by the above idea.

>
> What is in general important to know is that we have not had the best
> experience with GSoC students doing work on the core of KWin. Given that I
> proposed guidelines for future feature additions to KWin by non-core
> developers [1].
Those are really strict guidelines, but I guess they are well based
given the past experiences, so I won't complain. There are a couple of
points that this possible project does not appear to respect, but
those are unclear and debatable when applied to this, in my view.
However, it looks to me as if no further significant features can be
added to KWin if you respect all those points by the letter.

Probably the colour correction code can be kept isolated in a couple
of separate files, without interfering much with the normal KWin
workings. This code would be responsible with getting the lookup
textures for the monitors (or screens) and the windows (possibly). It
may turn complicated and large, but at least it would be isolated.

>
> Given recent discussions on this mailinglist about Oyranos and colord I am
> very unsure whether I want any color management relevant code in KWin at the
> moment. I will definitely not accept any code supporting only one of the two
> systems and any additional build or run-time dependency to KWin will not be
> accepted.
Alright, so this colord is a must, eventually. I should document
myself about colord too. But at least I could ask not to make it part
of the objectives for the summer.
>
> In general there seems to be agreement that color management has to be done
> inside the toolkit/application and not inside the compositor. A fully color
> corrected compositor seems feasible to me, but one where some applications
> need to start opting-out of being color corrected is nothing I want to see in
> KWin as it adds significant complexity and overhead to the rendering process.
> This is something the Oyranos community has to decide on how they want to have
> that handled.
This is still a hot topic so I would prefer not to comment at the
moment, and the decision is yours anyway.

Best regards,
Casian