[Openicc] [Gimp-print-devel] [Printing-architecture] Colour

[Michael Sweet]

On Nov 13, 2009, at 9:20 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Nov 12, 2009, at 2:57 PM, Michael Sweet wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> I agree with most of this. Although I don't know if printer manufacturers would agree to relinquish their own color controls. I'm not a huge fan of their controls and I think they are a waste of space. But they do likely achieve a major goal for manufacturers, which is platform parity for their products.

I see it as a combination of inertia - before color management you needed all those controls - and marketing pressure where more controls == better in the eyes of marketing.

In any case, whether they provide such controls or not, the default should be to do a good job of rendering colors in the handoff space their driver specifies. "Vivid" color should be an option, not a default.

> ...
> So I disagree that "custom printer profiles are of limited usefulness" or that the "results are not ideal." I have much bigger complaints than not being able to peak inside the Epson/Canon/HP black box. I'm annoyed that it's so f'n difficult to reliably print profile targets on Mac OS X without ColorSync sticking its nose into the wrong business. When that happens, the resulting profile is completely FUBARd and that is truly of limited usefulness and results that are not ideal.

While you are quick to blame ColorSync, the issue of providing colors in the device color space to avoid transforms is well-known and every profiling tool I know of for the Mac already does the right thing to print a target.

The most common problem is drivers - vendors incorrectly choose defaults or ignore color settings (applying *both* the colorsync profile *and* their own "enhancements") which leads to strange results. A very common problem with the Epson drivers is that the Epson color controls are not actually disabled in ColorSync mode! However, bugs like those are propagated to avoid "breaking" existing users' workflows (!?!)

So, while you may be able to use custom printer profiles with off-the-shelf printer drivers under specific circumstances, most people lack the knowledge or equipment to actually make use of those profiles, so I say they are of limited usefulness with less than ideal results.

___________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer



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