<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Nov 11, 2009, at 9:45 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">...</font></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div>So really the color options for the driver would be:<br><br>(*) Manufacturer named default color matching method. Example: "Epson Standard (sRGB)" and possibly provide a popup menu for additional manufacturer defined color matching methods, again example: "Epson Vivid" and "Adobe RGB (1998)" which are typical of various Epson CUPS drivers on Mac OS X.<br><br>( ) System color matching. Example: "Oyranos"<br><br><br>That's really it. The user needs to pick between a proprietary color matching method just because that default is what the major print manufacturers tend to want. If that's not a consideration at all then no UI even required. Just normalize correctly behind the scenes (and I can go through various combinations of all of this from very simple to very complex).<br><br>And I'd definitely avoid having a No Color Management or Off option in the driver UI. That's even more confusing. An application that needs a completely raw path needs to request that path, that way it's consistently chosen correctly rather than depending on the user to do it. Plus such an application is a very special use case, and is a huge hurt me button for most users, best not directly exposed in the UI. Document the off switch that's under the hood, and have an application that explicitly asks for that behavior.<br></div></blockquote></div><div><br></div>OK, my $0.02:<div><br></div><div>For the general case, I actually think you want no color controls. If a printer driver provides ICC color profiles, the printing system uses them to convert all color data in the document using that profile (document color -> PCS -> device color). If a printer driver says to use a standard color space (sRGB, AdobeRGB, etc.), then that is implicitly the device color space. Let the printer drivers actually support the color space they advertise and do their best to reproduce the colors - we all know they will not exactly match the screen since there are too many variables to account for: screen, printer, lighting, humidity, temperate, marker (ink/toner/wax/etc), media type, resolution, eyes, marketing segment for a printer, etc.</div><div><br></div><div>One of the biggest problems we have with Mac OS X color management are the color controls. Too many users try to tweak every knob we have, and too many drivers provide extra knobs that interfere with managed color reproduction. The best advice we can give to our users is to turn off all of the vendor controls (if necessary) and leave our color controls set to the defaults. If Linux wants to avoid the "mistakes" of the Mac and Windows world, eliminate vendor controls and minimize (or eliminate) the "standard" color controls. Let the "expert" applications provide controls for color profile and rendering intent, which is equally important to make out-of-gamut colors look reasonable, and leave those controls out of the standard/general print dialog.</div><div><br></div><div>....</div><div><br></div><div><div>From the point of view of a color-managed workflow, the ideal color space for printer drivers is DeviceN, i.e. a 6-color printer gets 6 color channels, with the separation defined by the ICC profile for that printer, media, color mode, etc. However, the reality is that we don't have tools to create or the infrastructure (at least on Mac OS X) to handle profiles with more than 4 channels, and thus most drivers take RGB or CMYK and map it to DeviceN as needed. Because of this, custom printer profiles are of limited usefulness in a printing workflow - you can (and many people do) tweak the output for a particular set of printer, inks, and media, but the results are not ideal because you are not manipulating the color in the printer's native color space. Moreover, many high-end printers now provide so-called "closed loop" profiling on the printer to normalize the output for the current supplies and environment, making the "traditional" manual profiling workflow unnecessary.</div><div><div></div></div><div><br></div><div>___________________________________________________</div></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Monaco; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div>Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer</div><div><br></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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