[Gimp-developer] Color management preferences not working and other CM stuff

[Hal V. Engel]

I just built GIMP from subversion trunk.  This did fix the lcms plugin error.  
But on my system the color management preferences are not working.  
Specifically when I try to change any of the profiles there are significant 
issues.  At first I though that perhaps my configuration was corrupted but 
removing it and letting gimp recreate it did not fix the problem (#1 below).

1.  After setting one of the profiles (for example the monitor profile) in the 
preferences dialog it disappears after the dialog is closed.  Almost like I 
had pressed Cancel instead of OK.  That is when reopening the dialog this is 
reset to (None).  This is happening with all of the profile settings in the 
dialog.

2. The profile file dialog currently does not use system standard profile 
directories.  I know that this will not be fixed in the upcoming release. 

3. The file dialog does not have a way to show hidden directories that I have 
been able to find other than typing in the path.  This is probably a GTK 
issue rather than a GIMP issue.  But it does make the dialog more difficult 
to use if you keep your profiles in the Linux standard user location for 
these files (IE. ~/.color/icc).  I know this will not be fixed for 2.4 but 
would it be possible to set this up so that it at least remembers where the 
user last opened a profile and defaults to that location instead of always 
opening in the current directory?  That way once I open a profile in 
~/.color/icc the dialog would open in that same location the next time.

4. The file type filter on the profile file dialog is limited to *.icc or all 
files.  Since profiles can also have a .icm extension that needs to be added 
to the ICC Profile filter.

5. Of course this has already been touched on but most applications that do 
color management do not present users with lists of files names for profiles.  
Rather they use a widget that parses the profiles in (at least) a given 
directory or, better, all system standard locations for profiles and uses the 
profile description tag to build a list of available profiles for the user.  
In addition, these widgets usually will also filter the profiles and only 
present users with a list of those that are of the correct type for the 
current context (IE. only display profiles if a user is selecting a monitor 
profile).  In general profile file names tend to be rather cryptic and the 
description tag tends to be more user friendly.  Unfortunately writing such a 
widget is somewhat involved and the only GTK application that I know of that 
has this feature is Cinepaint.  All of the other open source apps that do 
this that I know about are QT based (LProf, Scribus and Krita).   I know that 
this will not make it into 2.4 but it does need to get done at some point.  
Perhaps this can make it into 2.4.1 or 2.5/2.6 or whatever version is next.

There should also be a UI for users to:

1. Embed profiles into images.
2. Do color space conversions to images.

These are both missing at this point.  Separate and separate+ does some of #2 
but is rather specialized (IE. looks like it should be part of a CMYK 
printing work flow).  The color manager plugin by Jordi Canton has this 
functionality but likely needs to be updated to work with gimp 2.3 and would 
need some work to make the UI a little more user friendly.  If these changes 
were made to this plugin it would be good to include this as part of GIMP.  
Perhaps this could be done as part of the next release but I would really 
like to see something like this in 2.4.  Without this implementing a full CM 
work flow is much more difficult for users.

Hal