[Openicc] Is CUPS the right place for printer color management...

[edmund ronald]

Chris,

I see no reason for anyone to reinvent the wheel.

But we really, really want a way to get so called "untagged" data
through to us from pro and prosumer apps: the most horrible failing of
Mac CUPS needs to be fixed.

The consumer print path should fall into place without trouble, as we
expect to publish both media settings and canned profiles for the
print path, and thus a profile application module from the default
"consumer" space (sRGB) should create a nice consumer user-model.

I don't anticipate any Gutenprint issues with color management,
provided upstream is fairly sane (unlike Mac Cups) and no excessive
demands are made on color management abilities of the Gutenprint
developers.

Edmund



On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 12:04 AM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
> So considering this, I would not reinvent the wheel. I don't see a problem with *cupsICCProfile. It enables exactly this future potential.
>
> Chris
>
> On Feb 7, 2011, at 3:43 PM, edmund ronald wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>>>
>>
>>> Ask who is going to build the drivers before something else gets
>>> implemented. Gutenprint does leverage *cupsICCProfile, although just as
>>> defaults for grayscale, RGB and CMYK.
>>
>> As I understand things, at the moment we tell Mac OS X that we accept
>> its standard handoff workspace (previously Generic RGB) and we have
>> Robert's manually constructed behavior that prints files in this
>> workspace fairly decently. In the future the printers should be
>> profiled for "standard" media, and FOR CONSUMER DEFAULTS we would
>> somehow invoke a conversion from  the handoff space by using the
>> printer profile. On OS X I think we will be able to continue to
>> persuade the OS to do the conversion automagically, in Linux we might
>> have some special piece of code to do that if we have to - but this is
>> just so we have nice consumer default behavior.
>>
>> At the moment, because of the desire to have decent default behaviors,
>> the default print settings for Gutenprint do not really exercise a
>> modern printer's gamut; this should change in the future, as soon as
>> profile conversion can be invoked to render the handoff space data.
>>
>> Concerning non-default behavior, for "pro" and "prosumer" printing the
>> model I envision is that  the user does profiled printing, via a
>> profile, either RGB or CMYK. I don't think we will do any workspace
>> conversion, it's up to the user to apply a profile to his data
>> somewhere upstream; we don't have the smarts to program the profile
>> application ourselves well enough. We will provide some usable
>> RGB=>CMYK conversion so that there is a usable RGB workflow.
>>
>> I HAVE PERFORMED PRELIMINARY TESTING myself of this "pro" user-model,
>> using our existing RGB=CMYK conversion, and can affirm that results on
>> current Epson graphics printers will be roughly comparable to what is
>> achievable with the present vendor drivers in quality, although there
>> might be a very slight gamut advantage with the native Epson drivers.
>> Once we go this way -sometime in the future - we would expect to
>> supply "decent" canned profiles for this mode for the main Epson
>> media, and other media can be profiled by us or profiles can be
>> contributed by users TOGETHER WITH THE APPROPRIATE MEDIA SETTINGS.
>>
>> Edmund
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