[Openicc] CUPS Color Management under Linux gets into distros

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 4, 2011, at 7:13 AM, Cyrille Berger Skott wrote:

> 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?

If the end goal is something that will be printed, I'd roughly guess 98-99% of them at least proof their own work on a printer themselves. Or at least want to.


> And how many would want to do 
> it from inside Krita?

Can't answer that. Don't know the market.


> 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.

Absurd. That's the entire point of color management. The artist can see the printable colors on-screen so they aren't choosing colors that can't be printed in the first place; and they can simulate the press on a local cheap printer as well. That is for drawings and paintings. Artists are using inexpensive inkjet printers to produce prints that cost thousands, to tens of thousands of dollars, per print. The artists can afford inkjet printers of some size or they could not afford their computer or their apartment.

They send these to a print shop that has NO idea what the color intention was, so they do several iterations just agreeing on the color. $1 per print? $5? $50? This is the reason why no company who understands inkjet printing and color management is outsourcing high end contract proofing. They do it in house. They do not send it to a print job for proofs. The print shop is for cheaply printing 100, or 1000, or 100,000 copies. Not for proofing. Proofing is a huge profit center for print shops.


> 
> 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.

Well yeah it would have to be color managed or the workflow would be fakaked, wouldn't it? It would be fragile and unpredictable.

I think Krita must be a good example application that is in need of the CPD. If it can simply hand off the document correctly, its job is done. It's up to the print pipeline to do the right thing from that point on. Why in the world should we go to a monolithic specialized printing application just to get something proofed on a desktop inkjet printer?

> 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).

I would think a large percentage of comic design would be vector based, even the text that looks sorta hand written could be a font, and PDF would be highly suited for this task.

> 
> 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.

OH well, I guess they don't care too much about color accuracy.


Chris Murphy