[Openicc] CUPS Color Management under Linux gets into distros

[Cyrille Berger Skott]

On Friday 04 March 2011, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> Well, I understand the expertise bit, and the hardware bit, and the
> interest bit. But the vision bit? Not being able to print directly
> what you paint?
How many artists do print their work themself? And how many would want to do 
it from inside Krita? I can see it as being important for a picture 
application, but for drawings/paintings, you would usually print them on 
printers that artist cannot afford, and it is more profitable for them to send 
it to a print shop.

> I mean, come on, even Audacity has simplistic printing, and it's
> a multitrack audio editor.
Makes me wonder what it prints :)

Here is a realistict workflow:

* artist paint image in "cool drawing/painting application"
* artist send image to print worker
* print worker print image using "cool printing application"

You might even insert in the workflow:
* artist send image to editor/layouter (not sure how about the proper name in 
english ;) )
* layouter put the image in a book/newspaper/magazine using "cool layouting 
application"
* layouter send book/newspaper/magazine to print worker

We want Krita to be the "cool drawing/painting application". And that does not 
involves printing. All we need to make sure is that the print worker can open 
the files produces by Krita in his "cool printing application", whatever that 
is. Or the editor in his "cool layouting application". And ideally, all this 
is done in a color managed workflow.

So far, the format to do so is PNG or TIFF, for which we save the color 
profile with the data, so if the printing shop and the layouter are using 
color managed application, then it is all good.

If someone was coming to us and say that exporting images to PDF is required 
by his print shop/editor, then we will have to implement a PDF export that 
countains the ICC profile (might be needed when we are done with implementing 
a full comic workflow, but until now, PDF is overkill for exchanging images).


There a few important points about the "cool X applications":
* that they can exchange loss-less information
* they are designed to achieve the task of the targetted user, and countains 
the feature that the user really need, and not feature that are somehow 
related

And that last point is important, and it is why we were considering removing 
the print option. Printing is somehow related to drawing/painting. It is one 
of the possible goal of the artist work. Similary, I would find it weird if 
PhotoPrint would get a brush engine, it is not something a print worker needs 
to print the resulting images.

> > We even have people who get
> > confused because most image viewer don't use the profile and the
> > image looks different than in Krita.
>
> Tell them to use proper viewers then :)

Is there any proper viewers other than graphics/imagemagick ? Usually my 
answer is that for export they would need to convert to sRGB, because, even if 
they themself switch to a proper viewers, they don't want to educate the whole 
world.

-- 
Cyrille Berger Skott