[CREATE] Fwd: Color swatches

[Igor Novikov]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Igor Novikov <igor.e.novikov at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 5:36 AM
Subject: Re: Color swatches
To: Olivier BERTEN <olivier.berten at gmail.com>


Hi Olivier,

Great work! I think we can include the code after additional modification
into sK1 as a part of palette manager. The most interested part is a
CorelDRAW format, because users can extract some proprietary palettes from
CorelDRAW installation (PANTONE palettes for example). It seems this code
allows resolving PANTONE colors usage issue into FOSS applications because
users will know where to get the palettes and how to convert its. Something
like as for MS core fonts for Linux ;)

Regarding registration color I am agreed with you. It should be special
color instance. For regular 4-color prepress it could be usual CMYK color
but for spot color separation it should be special instance (for ps/pdf
generation). We will extend sK1 colorspaces by this color type.

But proposed xml-palette format is complicated. It seems not all
applications will support such complex scheme. May be simple well-formatted
xml can be more useful as intermediate specification.

Regards,

Igor Novikov
sK1 Project
http://sk1project.org


On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Olivier BERTEN <olivier.berten at gmail.com>
wrote:

>  Hello!
>
>
>  It's been a while now that I've been analyzing color swatches in
> different software. Here is the result of my work:
> http://www.selapa.net/couleurs/fileformats.php (it's an update of
> http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/Talk:New_Colours_Format with another
> presentation). If someone has informations about other formats or precisions
> about these ones, I'd be happy to add it to the list...
>
>
>  I also started writing a conversion script (attached). For now, it can
> only read pal (riff), aco, act, acb (adobe and autocad unencrypted only),
> ase, acf, bcf, clr (colors only), cpl, qcl, bcs, cs. No write function is
> there yet. It returns a dictionary with the content of the swatch. All
> values are kept as in the original file, that's why there's a 'orig' field
> in the dictionary. I'm pretty new to python programming so my code is
> probably not optimal...
>
>
>  Now some thoughts about color swatches in general and about the CREATE
> draft:
>
>
>  Registration color
>
> IMHO, this shouldn't come in a color swatch file. It's a "system" color,
> just the opposite of 'None'. It depends of the colors used in the document.
> If you're using only cyan in your document, registration will be 100% cyan.
> If your document contains only magenta and yellow, registration will be red.
> And if you have spot colors, registration won't be C=100% M=100% Y=100%
> K=100%. In other words, registration can't be defined out of the document's
> context. Registration should just be added in the software's color list for
> any press work.
>
>
>  Color swatch draft
> <http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/index.php/Swatches_-_colour_file_format/Draft><http://create.freedesktop.org/wiki/index.php/Swatches_-_colour_file_format/Draft>
>
> The name and space attributes shouldn't be mandatory. A color doesn't need
> a name to come into a palette and many palettes are just a arbitrary
> "geometrical" division of the possibilities of color model. When you have
> #003399 in a palette, it's not because it looks like anything in real life,
> it's just because its neighbors are #003366 and #0033CC. It just shows
> different possibilities of RGB, whether you're using sRGB or AdobeRGB
> doesn't matter. The same applies to "Black 20%" (or C=10% M=20% Y=30% K%).
> There are a lot of such palettes where neither the name or the color space
> have any importance. By the way, Lab and XYZ don't need any color space
> since these are device-independant models.
>
> That model also lacks swatch informations (name, copyright, license, ...)
> and swatch-wide settings ("all rgb values are in Adobe1998 color space",
> "all color names start with 'PANTONE' and end with 'C'", ...).
>
>
>
>
>  Olivier
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/create/attachments/20080407/aadd5dba/attachment.html