Color Management

Color management ensures that the colors you see on screen match what ends up in a printed or exported file, and that images from different sources look consistent when used together. Without it, the same RGB numbers mean different things depending on the display, the printer, or the application that produced the file.

Paintapp supports two complementary color management systems: ICC profiles for traditional profile-based workflows (photography, print, web), and OpenColorIO (OCIO) for scene-linear VFX pipelines. Both run on the GPU — color transforms are executed as WebGL shader operations, not CPU table lookups.

Each system has its own preferences page, because a document uses one or the other, never both: Preferences → ICC Color Management and Preferences → OpenColorIO.

Profile-based color management

Use ICC when your work mostly lives in JPEG, PNG, PSD, print, and standard web or photo workflows.

Pipeline-based color management

Use OCIO when Paintapp is part of a scene-linear ACES or VFX pipeline and needs to match other tools using the same config.

ICC Profiles

An ICC profile (International Color Consortium) is a binary file that precisely describes how a device or color space maps numeric values to physical colors. Every image either embeds a profile or implicitly assumes one. When two images carry different profiles, the same triplet of numbers (say R 200 G 100 B 50) represents a different real-world color.

How Paintapp handles profiles

When you open a JPEG, PNG, PSD, or .icc file that contains an embedded ICC profile, Paintapp reads the raw binary profile, parses it fully (header, tag table, matrix and LUT data), and attaches it to the document. The profile is then used immediately for on-canvas display: the GPU converts from the document's color space to your monitor's sRGB or Display-P3 output each time the canvas is composited.

Color-managed display is automatic. If a document has an embedded profile you will see it rendered correctly without any extra steps.

Device-Independent Images (CIE XYZ / LogLuv HDR TIFF)

Some HDR TIFFs (SGI LogLuv compression) don't store RGB at all — they store CIE XYZ tristimulus values directly: a device-independent representation with no fixed primaries or white point of its own, wide enough to carry scene-linear HDR data (including values above 1.0, for highlights brighter than white) without clipping.

Paintapp opens these the same way Photoshop does: as an ordinary RGB document (the X, Y, Z values sit directly in the R, G, B channels) with a bundled "XYZ Profile" automatically assigned. That profile has no colorants or tone curve to apply — its device space already is the ICC connection space — so it converts to your monitor through the exact same profile pipeline as any other profiled RGB image, no special document mode required. As with any embedded profile, this is automatic: open a LogLuv TIFF and it displays correctly immediately.

The settings below live in Preferences → ICC Color Management, split into the three sections that page uses: Working Profiles (which profile a new document gets), Conversion Options (how a conversion is performed), and Policies (whether you are interrupted about a profile).

Working Profiles

A working profile (or working space) is the profile Paintapp uses as the default for newly created documents and for files that arrive without an embedded profile. Separate defaults exist for RGB, CMYK, and Grayscale — the preferences page labels the three rows simply RGB, CMYK, and Gray.

Conversion Options

These three settings decide how a conversion is carried out. Rendering Intent and Black Point Compensation apply directly to color-managed display and to soft proofing (including Gamut Warning); all three also seed the corresponding controls in Image → Convert to Profile, which you can still override per conversion.

Rendering Intent

When a color in the source space falls outside what the destination profile can represent, the rendering intent decides how to handle it.

Use Black Point Compensation

On by default. Maps the source profile's darkest black onto the destination's darkest black, so shadows are rescaled into the destination's dynamic range instead of being clipped to a flat block. It matters most when the destination cannot reach a deep black — press paper, say, whose darkest ink is around L* 15–20. Turn it off to see exactly where shadow detail would clip.

Use Dither (8-bit/channel images)

On by default. Applies an ordered dither to conversion results before they are quantized back to 8 bits per channel, trading a small amount of grain for the removal of banding in smooth gradients. It has no effect at higher bit depths, where there is enough precision that banding does not arise, and none on display — it is a property of a real conversion, such as Convert to Profile.

Policies

Policies decide when Paintapp interrupts you about a profile — they never change how a conversion is performed. Three checkboxes:

• (Profile mismatch) Ask When Opening (on by default) — fires when the embedded profile in an opened file differs from the working profile. You can convert the pixels to the working profile, keep the embedded profile as-is, or discard the profile entirely.
• (Profile mismatch) Ask When Pasting (on by default) — fires when pasted pixel data carries a different profile than the target document.
• (Profile missing) Ask When Opening (off by default) — fires when a file has no embedded profile at all. You can tag it with the working profile or leave it unmanaged.

With a checkbox off, Paintapp silently applies the safe default (keep the embedded profile on mismatch; assign the working profile when missing) without prompting.

Soft Proofing

Soft proofing answers the question "what will this image look like on a different output device?" — using the monitor you have. The destination can be any device with a profile: a printing press, a plain sRGB screen when you are editing on a wide-gamut display, or a grayscale output. Print is the classic case because the mismatch is most dramatic — a press reproduces far fewer colors than a monitor, so bright saturated blues, vivid reds, and deep blacks all get compressed or clipped when an RGB image is converted to ink. Soft proofing simulates the conversion on screen, so surprises show up while you can still fix them.

The three commands live in the View menu and are per window — two views of the same document can proof differently (for example, one normal view and one proofed view side by side).

View → Proof Setup

Chooses what device to simulate. Selecting any setup also turns Proof Colors on.

View → Proof Colors

Toggles the simulation on and off. While enabled, the canvas is rendered through the chain document → proof profile → monitor instead of document → monitor: every pixel is converted to the proof device's color space and back, so colors collapse to what that device can actually reproduce.

The proof conversion honors the Rendering Intent and Black Point Compensation settings from Preferences → ICC Color Management (the same settings used by Convert to Profile).

View → Gamut Warning

Overlays gray on every pixel whose color is outside the gamut of the proof device — colors that cannot survive the conversion and will be clipped to something else. Typical out-of-gamut areas in photos are saturated team-jersey reds, neon signage, and bright sky blues.

Gamut Warning works with Proof Colors on or off: with it off you see the original colors plus the overlay, which makes the flagged regions easier to judge. The overlay color is configurable in Preferences → Transparency & Gamut. Out-of-gamut is determined by the proof profile's built-in gamut table when the profile provides one (the exact boundary test, as in Photoshop); profiles without one fall back to measuring the perceptual difference (ΔE) of a roundtrip through the proof profile, which can flag a few extra pixels near the gamut boundary.

Screen Gamut

Paintapp can target the actual gamut of your display when compositing to screen. The setting is in Preferences → Interface under Screen Gamut:

• Auto (default) — detects at startup whether your browser reports a P3-capable display and picks Display-P3 or sRGB accordingly.
• sRGB — forces standard gamut output regardless of the display.
• Display P3 (Wide gamut) — outputs the wider P3 primaries. Colors that fall between sRGB and P3 are rendered more vividly on capable screens; they clip to sRGB on standard ones.

OpenColorIO (OCIO)

OpenColorIO is the open-source color management framework used across professional VFX and animation tools — Nuke, Blender, DaVinci Resolve, Houdini, Arnold, and others. Instead of per-device ICC profiles, OCIO uses a single config file that defines every color space in a production: scene-linear renders, log-encoded footage, display transforms, and looks, all as a connected graph.

OCIO is most useful when Paintapp is part of a larger pipeline where assets move between applications. A shared config ensures that a texture authored in Paintapp is interpreted identically in the renderer and the compositor.

In Paintapp, OCIO-managed documents are RGB-only. If you need CMYK, Lab, or Grayscale document workflows, use ICC-based color management instead.

Bundled ACES configs

Paintapp ships with two bundled OCIO configs from the official OpenColorIO Configuration for ACES project, so you can try OCIO immediately without downloading anything else. ACES stands for Academy Color Encoding System: a scene-linear color and interchange standard widely used in film, animation, and VFX pipelines.

Both bundled configs share the same core ACES working roles: scene_linear is ACEScg, color_timing and compositing_log are ACEScct, and texture_paint uses sRGB-encoded Rec.709. The practical choice is simple: start with CG Config for most ACES-based CG work, and use Studio Config when you need the extra camera input spaces or the broader set of SDR, HDR, and cinema review transforms.

What is implemented

Paintapp includes a native JavaScript OCIO engine that parses and executes OCIO v1 and v2 config files directly in the browser — no server or plugin required.

• Full OCIO YAML config parsing including ColorSpace, ViewTransform, NamedTransform, roles, aliases, families, categories, active displays and views.
• Transform types: MatrixTransform (with full inverse), GroupTransform, FileTransform (1D/3D LUT — .cube, .spi1d, .spi3d), CDLTransform (slope / offset / power / saturation), AllocationTransform, LogTransform.
• Scene-to-scene color space chaining through the reference interchange space.
• Config can be loaded from a local file at startup or changed at any time in preferences.

The display chain (scene-linear → display-referred via a view transform) is partially complete; the v2 display path is under active development.

Setting up a config

1. Start with one of Paintapp's bundled ACES configs if you want OCIO immediately. Bring your own OCIO v2 config only when you need to match another application, a show LUT package, or a studio-authored pipeline.
2. Put your .ocio file in the user/presets/ocio folder and it is offered in the Configuration list alongside the builtins — the same way a brush preset is picked up. Alternatively choose Custom… in that list to point at a config anywhere you have granted access to.
3. A config that references LUT files needs those reachable too. OCIO resolves a search_path relative to the config file's own folder, so keep the .ocio file and its LUT folder together.
4. Click OK. The config loads immediately — no restart required.

ICC vs OCIO — which to use

If you are not working inside a VFX pipeline, leave the OCIO fields empty and rely on the ICC working spaces.