[Openicc] Printing targets: App or driver ?

[Alastair M. Robinson]

Hi,

On 16/05/11 18:14, Jan-Peter Homann wrote:

> What is the advantage to profile the printer in RGB-mode, if gutenprint
> allows it to do in CMYK ?

Why enforce a colour space at all?  Encourage the use of one over 
another by all means, but don't arbitrarily disallow a colourspace 
unless you have *very* good reason.

It's much easier to create a good RGB profile than it is a good CMYK 
profile; for an RGB profile there's just the three-dimensional colour 
space to worry about.  For CMYK you not only have to sample four 
dimensions, which requires way more patches, but you also have to 
consider total ink coverage and black generation functions.

A good CMYK profile may give slightly better results than the canned RGB 
-> CMYK conversion in the driver (in some cases maybe significantly 
better, but Gutenprint's RGB->CMYK is pretty good), but the extra effort 
required to get there will make it less likely that we'll be able to 
crowd-source profiles.

All the best
--
Alastair M. Robinson