[cairo] Spot colors (and CMYK)

[Jon Cruz]

On Feb 16, 2010, at 12:08 PM, Bill Spitzak wrote:

> More importanly, "attached profiles" are NOT WANTED, EVER! I work with 
> professional image processing software, and we long ago learned that 
> attached profiles are NEVER wanted. We ignore them in png, we ignore 
> them is exif files, we ignore them in Red camera data. One of the 
> biggest pains at The Foundry is figuring out how to ignore profiles in 
> Apple Quicktime files and get the raw data. Please take a look at the 
> Nuke release notes if you don't believe me. This crap is occupying at 
> least one developer 100% of the time and many other are working on it. 
> Currently Nuke is using ffmpeg whenever possible, it reports raw YUV 
> values and we do a FIXED and predictable conversion to sRGB. THIS IS 
> WHAT USERS WANT!!!!

I think you are making a huge, but all too common error here.

You are taking the experience of your specific workflow and company business and projecting that onto other different businesses and workflows.

While *you* may not want attached profiles, a professional print house doing offset printing of jobs submitted by an experienced professional graphic designer will often want profiles. It is very common to have a print house strip everything and assume the user did not know what they are doing (including doing visual tweaks to the input before printing), but have that same house use input as specified when the user explains that they do indeed actually know what they are doing.

(for an example in the TV/film industry, the "green slave girl" problem is often cited)

So when you say "THIS IS WHAT USERS WANT!!!!", are you speaking from experience for all users everywhere, including those who work in the print realm, deal with overprint, trapping, knockout, etc.?