WebGL canvas color management

Category: Graphics
Type: Chromium catches up
Status: Enabled by default (Chrome 104)
Intent stage: Prepare to ship

Breaking change: No
Enterprise impact: Medium
Chromium flag: WebGLColorManagement
Spec maturity: Published standard
Web Platform Tests: No

WPT details: This is tested by the WebGL conformance tests.

Summary

Implementation of WebGL color management API WebGL allows specification of - the color space that its drawing buffer is - the color space that content should be converted to when importing as a texture This feature is to update our implementation to include this functionality. Prior to this feature, both of these defaulted to sRGB. Now they can also use "display-p3".

Motivation

The web is adding the ability to use colors outside of sRGB color space. This is possible using images and video. CSS color level 4 added CSS colors, and Canvas Color Management added it for 2D canvas. This enables non-sRGB color spaces for WebGL.

Standards & signals

Specification: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/WebGL/pull/3292
Firefox: Positive — Developed in close collaboration with Mozilla, spec changes reviewed by Mozilla.
Safari: Positive — Discussed in ColorWeb CG with Safari
Web developers: Strongly positive
Tracking bug: https://crbug.com/1208480

Ecosystem

Web Platform Tests: https://wpt.fyi/results/?q=webgl-canvas-color-management
Chrome Platform Showcase: https://chrome-platform-showcase.paulkinlan-ea.deno.net/features
GenDN reference: https://gendn.paulkinlan-ea.deno.net/features
chrome.dev demos search: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Achrome.dev+WebGL%20canvas%20color%20management
MDN Web Docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=WebGL%20canvas%20color%20management
Baseline status: https://webstatus.dev/?q=WebGL%20canvas%20color%20management

Samples: https://ccameron-chromium.github.io/webgl-examples/p3.html

View on chromestatus.com