[Openicc] Scarse Profile Library Warning

[Kai-Uwe Behrmann]

Scarse is a project for profiling scanners under GPL based on Argyll code. 
It started in the old century and became pretty silent, with the last news 
dating from 2005. The project provides a nice collection of ICC profiles 
in the Scarse Profile Library [1], which is now used by some open source 
graphics packages. ICC profiles referring to standards are used to 
describe the exact colorimetry of a colour space. The ICC profiles are 
used to convert to and from other colour spaces in order to exchange with 
applications, services and customers. It is therefore crucial to meet 
these standards otherwise results will be incorrect right from the 
beginning and might render further colour work damaged.

Claudio Wilmanns [2] revealed today a colorimetric imprecision inside the 
Scarse WideGamutRGB profile. Norman Koren [3] hinted that the Scarse 
profiles do not pass a profile validation tool. OpenICC could never verify 
these profiles or how they where build and therefore did not cover any of 
them in its icc-profiles-openicc data set.

After these comments I like to warn of the usage and distribution of any 
of the Scarse Profiles for the sake of users trusting profiles of the 
affected packages in their workflows. We are looking for replacements for 
some of the most popular ones.

Affected Profiles are AdobeRGB, AppleRGB, WideGamutRGB, CIE-RGB, ECI-RGB, 
sRGB, KodakProPhotoRGB, ColorMatchRGB and more.

Affected Packages are libkdcraw [4]. Some of the 
shared-color-profiles/Argyll [5] ‘lcms’ generated profiles from the colord 
author use in parts the colorimetry of Scarse profiles. The later profiles 
are not included in the Argyll-1.1.0 source package. These profiles are at 
risk.

Disclaimer: the author, Kai-Uwe Behrmann, maintains the 
icc-profiles-openicc package containing ICC profiles describing colour 
standards.

kind regards
Kai-Uwe Behrmann
-- 
developing for colour management 
www.behrmann.name + www.oyranos.org

[1] http://www.scarse.org/goodies/profiles/
[2] http://lists.color.org/pipermail/icc_users/Week-of-Mon-20111114/000682.html
[3] http://www.normankoren.com/color_management_3.html
[4] http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=libkdcraw.git&a=tree&h=427d4da4ce616491215da8a818f006635c291f50&hb=a72bd2dab656bdefed85ca8b5307b457d3bb5e51&f=profiles
[5] https://github.com/hughsie/shared-color-profiles/tree/master/profiles/Argyll