How to change screen saturation?

[Hal V. Engel]

On Sunday, January 02, 2011 11:42:09 am Alberto González wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I just got a new laptop (Dell XPS 15) that I ordered with an optional RGB
> LED display. This display has a high color gamut (around 98% of AdobeRGB
> color space). The problem is that probably to show off this capability the
> manufacturer set it by default to a very high saturation level. On Windows
> I just went to Intel graphics control center and set the saturation to
> -20. However, on Linux I've been unable to find any way of doing something
> similar.
> 
> Does anyone here know how this could be done? I know it sounds like a minor
> problem, but it's actually very annoying in regular use, not to mention for
> photo editing which is one of the reasons why I ordered this screen).
> 
> This laptop should have an NVIDIA discrete card too (apart form the one
> integrated in the CPU -core i3- from Intel), and I guess that installing
> the proprietary drivers for it I might get a control center where I might
> be able to change the saturation, but it seems like an overkill solution,
> especially when I don't want to use that card or any proprietary drivers.
> 
> I'm not at all sure this is actually a hardware/drivers problem, maybe it's
> just a software one and KDE/GNOME could have something to control the
> saturation, but I didn't find it there either (I tried in KDE's CC to turn
> all 3 color slides down hoping it would change the saturation, but it only
> makes the screen darker).
> 
> Any hint much appreciated. Thanks!
> Alberto.

Because the monitor has a large gamut you will get higher than normal 
saturation unless you color manage the display system wide (IE. not just in CM 
aware software).  The reason that this is happening is that currently most 
software other than a few color management aware apps (GIMP, Scribus, 
CinePaint...) is assuming that displays have approx. sRGB characteristics (IE. 
gamut, primaries, gamma and so on) but your monitor is near AdobeRGB in gamut 
and likely has primaries that are significantly different from sRGB and that 
assumption fails apart under those conditions. 

If you are using  compiz there is a CM plug-in named Compicc (see 
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/compicc/index.php?title=Main_Page) 
available that will allow you to color manage your display system wide.  But 
to really use this correctly you will need to create (or get if one is 
available) an ICC profile specific to your monitor(s).

Hal