[Openicc] Assigning ICC profiles to pinter driver settings part 2

[Chris Murphy]

A big part of the reason we even have application color management (pre-matching) is because of dissatisfaction of choices by system level color management.

1. Mac OS & Windows: Lack black point compensation, so the most commonly used intent RelCol+BPC is not possible. This is probably the top usage case for application color management, especially with the still dominant ICC v2 dependent workflows we have.

2. Mac OS & Windows: Proofing. There is no driver option to specify some other space for proofing/simulation.

3. Mac OS (until recently): No means of specifying a device profile in the print dialog. It was there, then it wasn't there, now it's back. Will it vanish again some day?

4. Mac OS: No means of supporting 3rd party CMMs in the print path. Apple removed this capability circa 10.3 and there's no reason to believe it's coming back.

So I think if the open source community avoids these pitfalls, application color matching (prematching) for printing isn't really needed. The application simply needs to be able to request proper tagging of all objects when submitting the file for printing. I think this is better than the normalization-prematch workflow anyway, especially when we talk about more complex documents that are best suited being color managed and rasterized in a PDF/X-4 manner, which inevitably means downstream, not by the application itself.


Chris Murphy