Reduce confusion from magenta out-of-gamut color indicators
This was originally a bug report about the soft-proofing "Mark out of gamut colors" feature. However, as explained in the comments, I misunderstood that there is a separate marking of out-of-gamut colors.
Description of the feature
In GIMP 2.10, LCH (Lightness, Chroma, Hue) sliders were introduced to the color picker dialog. These were made the default visible set of sliders over the previous (but still available) HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) sliders.
It appears these sliders allow for choosing colors outside of the default sRGB gamut. As a result, they are likely to show such colors as pure magenta, which indicates they are "out of gamut". Furthermore, when chosen, they are marked with a magenta triangle.
Whilst this feature is useful for users working with color spaces outside of sRGB, for most users (especially new and upgrading users) this may cause confusion or be misidentified as a bug (case in point; I initially wrote this post as a bug report). It is not immediately obvious that these colors are out of the current color profile's gamut.
User reports
Here are reports on reddit, where users have been confused by the new sliders and out-of-gamut indicators:
- https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/981u10/help_what_does_a_color_with_a_triangle_in_the/
- https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/902s4h/wierd_behaviour_with_the_hsv_sliders/
Example scenario
Here is a video of how dealing with the color picker looks like, from a fresh installation of 2.10.4. These are the steps I took to reproduce this scenario:
- Reset GIMP to defaults by renaming GIMP's user data directory
- Open GIMP and create a new image with the defaults
- Open the color picker dialog. Observe that the chroma slider is solid magenta
- Pick a random color on the cube. Observe that the sliders vary in "out of gamut" ranges.
- Using one of the sliders, pick a color inside the magenta zones
Suggestions
See Elle Stone's comment below for suggested changes.