color saturation (digital vibrance) RX550 using AMDGPU

[ShardDBN]

Hi guys, my PC is used for work (home office) and after having to learn Debian for a cloud webserver for about a year it's impressed me enough that I want to run it on my desktop.

I have a RX550 and literally after three or four extremely late nights of researching, pulling my hair out, researching some more, more hair pulling etc. I cannot work out how to control saturation (digital vibrance for Nvidia users).

I typically tone it down a few notches as default is always way to cartoony. I've been doing this since Win95, so surely this is possible in 2018 on linux?

I've tried Debian stable, testing and as a last resort Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (it crashed within an hour).

I really want to run Debian stable on my desktop but YT videos, images, icons, everything looks cartoony on default.

My monitor unfortunately doesn't have saturation control so that's out.

I can live with the fans not powering down at idle like they do in win 10 (they seem to run slow enough to be near-silent) but this is a deal breaker.

Everything else seems to be running fine so I'm feeling pretty frustrated at this point.

Is there a GUI for AMDGPU settings that I'm missing? Debian stable has a basic one for gamma and color balance (I calib bright/cont through the monitor so that's not a problem), but nothing useful beyond that.

Debian Buster and Ubuntu 18.04 don't appear to provide access to any GPU settings whatsoever (????).

Do I have any options or am I stuck waiting for a settings GUI to be implemented for AMDGPU who knows when?

N.B This is a repost from Reddit, wasn't having much luck there.

[bw123]

I've been using debian for awhile, and found dozens of ways to tweak the way it views images, vid, etc.. I really feel like I am getting good results, but I had to work at it. Not sure what kind of gui you are looking for? If the problem is with viewing yt video, then I'd look at whatever app you are using to watch them, and how they were made. The thing to do is setup your system correctly to view, or transfer, an image or video the exact way it was originally made. You can't generally improve garbage images, or shitty video quality, you just live with it. Seek out quality material for viewing, since you seem to have a setup where you can tell the difference.

There are a lot of opinions on how to do it. You could start with calibrating your monitor. There are also a shit-ton of tweaks for gamma in several places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_color_management

[ShardDBN]

Thanks for the feedback.

Saturation is reducing the color intensity desktop-wide. You get the same problem with a default windows installation (unless you're not fussy, which I gather most people aren't given the lack of discussion I found on it).

Saturation settings isn't the same as color balance, which is what color calibration addresses. I don't do high-end photo/vid work so I don't need to go as far as color calibrating my monitor, I just want to reduce the default saturation level a few notches.

In Windows this is obviously GUI but I can do it through the terminal, I just haven't been able to work out if it's possible with AMDGPU.

I open up "Radeon software" on the taskbar --> display --> color and there I can adjust saturation. I have it set to 82, I think default is 100.

I'd assume AMDGPU is defaulting to 100 and I'm wanting to change it down.

Settings on an app basis is fiddly and breaks if an app doesn't offer saturation control, which most don't (browser for example). I'm wanting to set the saturation level OS wide. I hope that's a bit clearer.

[bw123]

Well, you can use xrandr to adjust RGB, but some desktops have a GUI front end. Kde plasma in stretch has gamma and rgb on system settings> display and monitors. I don't really know about all the different desktops, or if that still applies if you are using wayland.

If the driver settings panel in windows calls it "saturation" or something, that doesn't mean it will be called the same thing on linux. I'm sure it will be possible for you to get some good results on a device like that.

[ShardDBN]

RGB is for color balance, not saturation. I did play around with RGB settings in Stretch and it just changed the color tone.

RGB settings change the tone of color. E.g. what shade of red and/or how much red relative to the other colors.

Saturation changes the intensity of the entire color spectrum. Think of your color settings on your TV. Set it too high and everything looks like a cartoon rainbow. Too low and it goes black and white - that's the setting I'm after in AMDGPU.

I had a look at xrandr and it seems to offer monitor display settings, same as can be found in Debian's options.

[bw123]

...
Saturation changes the intensity of the entire color spectrum. Think of your color settings on your TV. Set it too high and everything looks like a cartoon rainbow. Too low and it goes black and white - that's the setting I'm after in AMDGPU.
...

Maybe if you show the forum some (linux) documentation about saturation? If you get this (cartoon rainbow) by default in debian, I'd think it's a bug, or maybe ahardware error?

RX550 isn't very specific, use lspci, or pkg inxi
Maybe if you describe your hardware a little better and some other people can spot something.

good luck

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Does this help:

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help ... or.html.en

Particularly: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help ... en.html.en

[ShardDBN]

@bw123

It's not so much an error as just the default setting be too colorful (IMO because color is highly subjective). I prefer a more natural look on my screens and have always toned down color saturation a bit.

As to the hardware it's a Gigabyte Radeon RX 550 Gaming OC 2G. I don't think saturation is HW specific in this instance, it'd be handled through AMDGPU regardless of which RX card was being used. At least that's how it is in windows (same GUI settings software).

@Head_on_a_stick

That's RGB related again. Complete color calibration as opposed to a simple numeric saturation value.

Saturation *might* come up in a full color calibration run but I don't have the calibration hardware for that. Shouldn't need to as I can comfortably set saturation by eye using a numeric value.

I'm leaning towards this being an AMD problem unfortunately. Not about to go and buy a new vid card but when the time comes might revisit and see where AMDGPU is at.

Until then looks like I'm stuck on Win10 .

[bw123]

...
Until then looks like I'm stuck on Win10 .

sucks to be you... hope you figure it out.
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm

[ShardDBN]

Yeah. Thanks for the feedback though. Desktop wise I'm a complete Linux noob but good to know there's people willing to help.

[debiman]

i know what you're talking about because i had that option when i was using the proprietary nvidia driver, and it worked too.
if that applies to your situation also i'd say you need the proprietary amd driver.
if you have questions about that i suggest you provide the output requested.

you should also look closer at color calibration, esp. under gnome, i think it's fairly sophisticated.
you don't necessarily need the tool. preset color profiles for particular monitors exist.

[ShardDBN]

Yeah from what I've seen the proprietary Nvidia driver provides a control panel with saturation option.

I believe the older proprietary AMD driver did once too it but doesn't have support for newer cards (Polaris 12 in this instance).

This is based on what I read on the Debian WIKI:

https://wiki.debian.org/AtiHowTo

https://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary

I think I tried installing the AMD driver on their website out of desperation (18.3 or something from memory) on Ubuntu and that didn't have a control panel.

I did go through color calib options in both gnome and KDE I think it was, both needed calib hardware. Not sure if saturation was part of the tuning.

With Buster the system automatically set a color profile for my monitor (AOC i2781fh) so that seems to be covered.

I read on AMD's forum that they might be looking to release a major version end of year with a GUI panel. Not confirmed though.

[debiman]

even if there isn't a gui for it, it's still possible that this feature is available via command line or configuration files.

i don't know for sure, but it's worth checking out.

[bw123]

I searched a little on it today. It seems nvidia has 'digital vibrance' and amdgpu has 'saturation' settings and people are debating which is better and how to do either/or on each.

It's not just an RGB setting. Apparently it gets the driver to enhance ( or degrade?) only the dominant color. Pretty interesting...

[ShardDBN]

even if there isn't a gui for it, it's still possible that this feature is available via command line or configuration files.

Possible yes but that's pushing my knowledge as a linux desktop noob . I wouldn't even know where to start trying to suss out the saturation command from terminal.

As part of my research I did look for documentation/discussion of AMDGPU terminal settings config but other than what's already been discussed didn't turn up anything pertaining to saturation.

From the AMD forums I got the sense AMD hadn't really given us much to control yet via terminal. That's apparently coming at some point.