[Gimp-developer] 2.4 showstoppers

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday 15 November 2006 10:05, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> On 11/15/06, Sven Neumann wrote:
> > I know about the OpenICC project and I am subscribed to the
> > mailing-list. But I don't think they can provide me with a decent
> > proposal for color management policies and what terms to use.
>
> If by "them" you are referring to developers of Scribus, ICC-Examin,
> LProf etc. and technical specialists of Lexmark, HP and Adobe, then,
> most likely, yes -- "they" can. If you are referring to somebody else
> from that list, then it could be both yes and no ;)
>
> Following pages are of interest:
>
> http://www.oyranos.org/wiki/index.php?title=What_the_users_want
> http://www.oyranos.org/wiki/index.php?title=Concepts
>
> Alexandre

For the most part the existing OSS applications that are color management 
aware more or less use terminology and policy settings that are similar to 
Photoshop.  Some only implement a subset and others have a much more complete 
implementation.  So in a way Sven is correct and if this approach were 
followed (IE. model this after photoshop) that at the very least would be a 
good starting place and most CM savvy users would feel comfortable with the 
result.  

But I am also sure that if the OpenICC list were queried for some expertise to 
help with finalizing the design of the CM UI that you would in fact get 
someone (perhaps even a small group) who would provide the needed expertise.  
In addition to virtually every OSS project that has an interest in CM having 
someone from their development team subscribed to the OpenICC list there is a 
wide range of CM experts and professionals including authors of books on the 
subject and as Alexander points out representatives from various 
manufacturers and the ICC itself.    Making the OpenICC list a valuable 
resource for any OSS project that is involved in implementing CM awareness.  
In addition you might find that these experts have places were they feel the 
photoshop way of doing things has problems and issues and that you might see 
some proposals that would result in the CM support actually being better than 
it is in photoshop.

Also some time ago I put together a fairly detailed description of what was 
needed and where this should be located in the GIMP menu structure that I 
submitted to this list.  There have been similar proposals from others as 
well.  For the most part these are similar to photoshop's implementation.  
With the exception of printer CM support there is not that much work that 
needs to be done to GIMP to finish off the CM implementation.  

One area were many on the OpenICC list agree is that the photoshop/proprietary 
OS approach to CM could be substantially improved in the area of printing.  
My GIMP proposal did not deal with color managed printing since my vision for 
how this should be handled would require significant changes to the 
gimp-print/guten-print plugin that I think are beyond the scope of 2.3/2.4 
and are in fact significantly different from how this is handled in 
photoshop.  Besides at this time there is PhotoPrint which will fill this 
gap, at least for Linux users, until such time as guten-print can implement 
CM support.  So I don't view CM printing support as necessary for the 2.3/2.4 
release cycle.  But I would be willing to help design this if someone though 
that this was in the scope of the current release cycle.  My printer proposal 
is in the OpenICC archives and if anyone here is interested I am sure I can 
dig it out and clean it up. 

Hal Engel 

LProf Project