12 years of incubating Wayland color management

The Wayland color-management protocol extension has landed on Feb 13th, 2025, in upstream wayland-protocols repository in the staging directory. It was released with wayland-protocols 1.41. The extension enables proper interactions between traditional (sRGB), Wide Color Gamut (WCG), and High Dynamic Range (HDR) image sources and displays once implemented in Wayland compositors and used in applications.

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Of course, a protocol is just a language. Two participants need to speak the same language for the language to be of any use: Wayland compositors and a component on the application side (e.g., a toolkit library). Major efforts have been going on in various projects to prove and take advantage of the protocol, including KWin, Mutter, Weston, wlroots, GStreamer, GTK, Qt, SDL, Mesa, and mpv. Support in Mesa means that applications will be able to render and display in HDR by using the relevant EGL and Vulkan features.
↫ Pekka Paalanen

Colour management has been an important missing piece of the Wayland puzzle, so it’s good to see this finally released and added to Wayland as a new protocol after so many years of work. It’s important to note that the work done so far focuses almost entirely on the entertainment side of things, like watching video or playing games. The other important side, professional colour management for things like photo editing or desktop publishing, is still missing, with the major holdup being measuring physical monitor response (measuring a reference image displayed on a monitor with a hardware device).