[CREATE] colour lists; in Oyranos?

[Kai-Uwe Behrmann]

Am 15.09.05, 11:43 +0200 schrieb Craig Bradney:

> On Thursday 15 September 2005 09:51, Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > small intro:
> > my name is Kai-Uwe Behrmann. I work on gtk1 CinePaint and Oyranos, a
> > colour management library. <www.cinepaint.org> <www.oyranos.org>
> >
> > The matter I like to write about is colour lists naming and
> > communication. You described some internal formats on the web site. All
> > they are ascii based. Well, I like the idea of human readable files.
> >
> > Anyway the ICC has allready included a way to describe such colour patches
> > in an ICC profile. See <www.color.org> for the spec. A binary format.
> >
> > I interprete such files in ICC Examin, my GPL licensed ICC profile viewer,
> > and use them for color space visualisations in CinePaint. A small plug-in
> > writes in CinePaint the colour list profiles. So the code is in place.
> >
> > the pro about ascii (xml profiles - maybe like in Microsoft Longhorn):
> > o they is human readable
> > o easy editable
> > o pretty good parsing
> >
> > the pro for binary (ICC profiles):
> > o small
> > o fast
> > o established format in the colour industry
> >
> > What I offer is to add an colour list API into Oyranos to adress the
> > matter. This means reading and writing patches and collections in the ICC
> > way (ICC1V42.pdf Section 10.14 namedColor2Type):
> >
> > o colour space identifer ("Rgb")
> > o identifer; 4 chars
> > o number of patches
> > o number of device channels - should be the same like the colour space
> >   channels
> > o common prefix
> > o common suffix
> >   - first name
> >   - first colours CIELab as 16-bit integer
> >   - first colours Device channels as 16-bit integer
> >
> >   - next colour
> >   ...
> >
> > You can then write named colour lists as ICC profiles, and write some
> > ascii back from an ICC ncl2 Profile.
> >
> > What does you think about this idea? Would you make usage from?
> 
> All of the applications (erm.. Scribus, Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, Cinepaint, 
> OpenOffice.org etc etc) need to be able to run without a colour system being 
> installed or at least active.

Yes, I thought of a small lib independently usable of Oyranos. Something 
like liboyranos_colourlists.so. A Project can use it with Oyranos or take 
the code over for portability. Code to read xml is needed as well.
 
> a) Many people don't have profiles
> b) Many don't know how to create one

The user interface would be in the applications, using mostly the current 
code. Just writing things out to a profile instead of a text file.
As well, no one creates hand written colour lists (as far as I heard).

> c) Many don't have a need for one (no need for colour management either)

Do You mean they dont need colour palettes? So they dont need the spec 
eighter?

> d) Many will have equipment not "worth" profiling (older/cheap LCDs, older 
> CRTs etc, or simply those without manufacturers' drivers or profiles.)

How does this belong to colour lists? They are independent from a 
for instance device profile.

> I think the best way is still an XML based file, but as profiling is important 
> to many, if the colour sets are defined with a certain target in mind then 
> they could reference an ICC profile, if that makes sense. When both are used 
> in combination, you get the same effect as above, I think. Perhaps the 
> possibility to import/export from a profile into an XML format would also be 
> of use. This would also lead to binary conversion from XML, and hence the 
> ability to fit with the industry that wants such formats.

What does a text based format provide other than the text form? Dont we 
end up in different formats for the same thing?

> regards
> Craig

regards
Kai-Uwe Behrmann
                                + development for color management 
                                + imaging / panoramas
                                + email: ku.b at gmx.de
                                + http://www.behrmann.name