[cairo] Rendering Intent names

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 10, 2010, at 1:51 PM, James Cloos wrote:

> I recently saw some interesting UI names for the four icc rendering
> intents; they look like they may be useful for cairo's api and docs.
> 
> They were:
> 
>     Match              for  absolute
>     Proof              for  relative
>     Picture or Photo   for  perceptual
>     Business or Vivid  for  saturation
> 
> They may prove easier for users to understand and remember than the
> names used by, eg, the PDF reference.

Yeah and then advanced users who actually understand the rendering intents by their proper names won't know what to choose. So you'd need to supply both in the UI if you go with something unique.

The risk of going with something unique, but plain English is that it's also misleading. The vast majority of images which are not both highly saturated and highly detailed, are best rendered using relative colorimetric plus black point compensation as the intent.

Absolute Colorimetric is the true proofing rendering intent, not relative colorimetric (without BPC), although if there are similar white points between media, or it's preferable to ignore the differences, then Relative Colorimetric can be used. So in that sense there are two proofing rendering intents possible.

Saturation is rarely used. I don't know that in practice it's all that helpful for business graphics.


Chris Murphy
Color Remedies (TM)
New York, NY
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Co-author "Real World Color Management, 2nd Ed"