[ptx] Display gamma... and colour management

[Hal V. Engel]

On Tuesday 03 January 2006 01:39 pm, Jean-Luc Coulon (f5ibh) wrote:
> Very interesting.
> But the problem is as well with the (potential) suppliers as with our  
> brave old X system.
> X is not really designed with colour management in mind. Maybe it is a  
> bit (!) old?
>
> [ ... ]
>
> Jean-Luc

This is being worked on.  Those interested in color management on open source 
systems should subscribe to the OpenICC email list or perhaps just have a 
look through the archives.  There is allot happening with color management in 
the open source community right now and over the next 6 months to a year we 
should have the ability to do at least as well as those with closed source 
systems.  Right now it just requires more effort and sometimes a little 
creativeness to get this stuff working.    The fact that we are talking about 
this on the Hugin list proves how far this has come of late. 

Some examples of what is happening:

Cinepaint, Scibus and Krita support a full CM workflow.  I now use cinepaint 
as part of my pano work flow because it supports CM and 16 bit / channel 
images.

UFRAW has support for CM in the raw conversion process.

ImageMagik has support for embedding profiles and doing color space. 
conversions.

Enblend now supports profile pass through.

Beta versions of GIMP now have some CM support and more CM support will be 
implemented before version 2.4 is released.

Oyranos is a set of X extensions to implement support much like the Windows 
color management control panel but better (more complete).  Still alpha at 
this point.

LPROF had been orphaned but is now being actively supported and enhanced.

Guten-print 5.0 has implemented many of the precursor elements needed to 
correctly support the building of printer profiles and will be adding full 
profile support in a later release.  I should add that Guten-print 5.0 is 
actually way better than the print drivers that come with Windows and the Mac 
in this respect.  For example, it supports total ink limits, CGR controls, 
per channel custom curves and gamma as well as custom per channel 
linearization curves.  It still needs per channel ink limits to be complete 
in this regard.  These features are only available on Windows if you pay for 
an expensive 3rd party RIP.  Full CM support could appear as early as version 
5.2.  

CUPS 1.2 (which is beta at this time) has support for handling the conversion 
from the document color space to printer color spaces.

Some of the above have been in place for some time (cinepaint, scribus and 
LPROF) but most of this is new work that has only recently become available 
to users.   There is other stuff happening as well.  So stay tuned.  

In another note to the list Kai-Uwe Behrmann writes that the basic issue is 
man power.   This is true for everyone of the above projects.  If more folks 
would step forward to help out this would result in these things becoming 
available sooner.  As the project lead for LPROF I can add that you don't 
have to be technical to help out.  Things like writing documentation and 
testing for example are very much needed and are a big help to these 
projects. 

Hal