[cairo] Spot colors (and CMYK)

[Chris Murphy]

I am unaware of a use case for turning off OS X's color management, other than for applications designed to perform device calibration and profiling. If you turn it off, your application will have worse consistency in color from display to display, printer to printer, and between display and printer.

And as for the idea that sRGB is an end all be all, is ridiculous. An sRGB color management workflow implies an assumed color space workflow and most of those assumptions are not only often wrong, but are increasingly wrong. sRGB has a role to play, but Kai-Uwe has rather plainly pointed out the pitfalls of oversimplifying this - oversimplification totally breaks color. You might as well provide an interface of 60 digital crayons for the user to specify colors, because any more granularity than this is in the vicinity of meaningless and useless.

Chris Murphy


On Feb 15, 2010, at 9:38 AM, cu wrote:

> Cairo is a vector drawing library, so an example of a photo that looks
> different is not relevant, in my opinion. As far as vector drawing goes,
> I suspect that many applications (such us ours, for example) don't care
> about the differences caused by different platforms and display profiles
> etc.  (As an aside, it took us quite a bit of work to turn off the
> automatic OSX color profile adjustment, suffice it to say they don't
> really mean "generic" when they say GenericRGB :) )
> 
> Others that do care, can and should deal with this, most likely by
> adjusting a palette they use as an input to vector drawing, ahead of
> time. This isn't a very difficult operation. Once performed, it should
> result in visually similar result on any given platform.
> 
> 
> Kai-Uwe Behrmann wrote:
>> Thats all no issue for a black and white word processor, as typical no one 
>> will simulate paper white in screen just to print black text ;-)
>> But for skin tones in a family photo album it is a problem: "Grand daddy 
>> looks on your monitor better then on mine."
>> 
>> To solve that brokeness, application developers need messy extra code for 
>> each OS they want to port to and avoid a large part of cairo APIs.
>> Thats in my opinion neighter easy nor the "right choice".
>> 
>> 
>> kind regards
>> Kai-Uwe Behrmann
>> 
> 
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Chris Murphy
Color Remedies (TM)
New York, NY
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Co-author "Real World Color Management, 2nd Ed"