[Openicc] Print Color Pipeline
Jan-Peter Homann
homann at colormanagement.de
Sat Jan 22 09:03:24 PST 2011
Hello all,
In this e-mail, I will describe a little bit more top view, my thought
about an open color management architecture, with a focus on the print
color pipeline.
I still think, that the best place to assign the printer profile to a
driver setting is the driver itself.
By the way, there is the german company turboprint
http://www.turboprint.info/ offering printer drivers for
LINUX
Mac OSX
Windows (now in beta)
which allow:
- true CMYK profiling through the driver
- assigning the driver stting specific profiles
- doing ICC-based colortransformations of rasterdata inside the driver
including choosing source profile and rendering intent
- building queues with different setting
- exchange driversettings and profiles through different OS
The Turboprint people made a in my eyes a quite good job for ICC-ready
printer drivers, which I have seen only in much more expensive
RIP-solutions, or which I have missed in traditional printer drivers:
- vendor drivers (no CMYK profiling)
- Gutenprint (no handling of ICC-profiles)
But lets come back to the color architecture.
Lets imagine, that assigning ICC to driver settings is solved for the
current driver. We now have to think about, to make it easy for the
enduser to synchronize the colormanagement settings from his application
to the print out.
If we look at the colormatch from the document colorspace to the
monitor, it is pretty normal, that the application to handle the
document is pulling the monitor profile from the system (or delivering
rasterized data with a document (source-) profile to the system for output.
The monitor profile itself will be configured on systemlevel (Oraynos,
Gnome ColorManager etc...).
If the printer profile should be configured in the driver, we need a
mechanism, that the driver can tell the system, what is the current
valid profile for the choosen driver setting.
In this case the color workflow from document to monitor and from
document to printout would be pretty the same. An internal graphics
engine, which can render the document from the document colorspace to
raster output on the monitor, can also render the document to a raster
print format.
If CUPS is between the document creating application and the printer
driver, we need a possibility to transport the document colorspace
through the CUPS file:
- If rasterized data are transported, this could be done through TOFF or
JPG with embedded ICC profile
- I PDF data are transported, the PDF output intent is used.
This leads to following places where ICC-profiles are configured:
System:
- monitor profile
- RGB-source-profile (sRGB) for non colormanagement aware applications
Colormanagement aware application:
- Document colorspace (RGB and/or CMYK if necessary)
Printer driver
- Driver setting specific ICC profiles
Is this something we can agree on ?
best regards
Jan-Peter
--
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homann colormanagement --------- fon +49 30 611 075 18
Jan-Peter Homann ------------ mobile +49 171 54 70 358
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