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

[Robert Krawitz]

   Date: Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:13:06 +0100
   From: edmund ronald <edmundronald at gmail.com>

   On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 10:35 PM, Michael Sweet <msweet at apple.com> wrote:

   > 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.

   I strongly disagree. Professional photographers and enthusiasts are
   now every day downloading custom profiles from media vendor sites,
   they are buying solutions such as ColorMunki and
   Spyder3Print. Photo labs use Mac systems by the thousands with
   standard inkjet drivers and custom media profiles to do big
   enlargements. Every Photoshop photo tutorial book now documents
   profiled printing with custom profiles.  Enough already. Give us
   back our ability to print targets, and let us then choose a forum
   for the public discussion of desirable exposed features of inkjet
   drivers - I suggest this be debated within the ICC Digital
   Photography Workgroup.

I think arguments of the form "most people don't need to/don't know
how to do this, so there's no reason to allow anyone to", along with
counter-arguments of the form "but my friends and I do!", quickly
become unproductive.  The former, because they ignore the diversity of
people's needs, and the latter because purport to answer the former
but don't really attack the basic premise.  Which is unfortunate,
since I think the basic premise of the former -- that we should just
cater to the needs of the masses, and consciously ignore anything more
specialized in the name of simplicity -- is way off base.

It's undoubtedly true that the vast majority of people don't have the
knowledge or equipment to make profiles.  There are umpteen million
Mac users out there but probably only umpteen thousands of people who
can usefully make profiles.  So you're basically reduced to pleading
a special case: my needs are so special that they should override the
goal of simplicity.  That's not going to work very well: people who
believe in this goal of ultimate simplicity of interface are
predisposed against special cases, and granting that kind of override
to one means granting it to everyone, which means the product has to
grow all manner of special cases.

I think the right argument here is simply that one size never fits
all, and that things need to be designed in such a way that most
people can ignore the fancy stuff and get their work done, but that
there needs to be an appropriately designed escape hatch allowing
people with more sophisticated needs to meet them.  A successive
disclosure of complexity is fine; people who don't need anything more
elaborate can simply not enable anything beyond the basics, but as
people's needs change, those additional facilities are available.

If nothing else, full 16-bit data paths (enabling adjustments at the
application level to preserve sufficient precision) and some kind of
unmanaged RGB, CMYK (if appropriate for the device), and DeviceN
inputs should be available.

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton