Re: In Defense of PS5 -> PS5 fatal bugs
Re: In Defense of PS5 -> PS5 fatal bugs
- Subject: Re: In Defense of PS5 -> PS5 fatal bugs
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 09:23:50 +0100
email@hidden wrote:
Henrik! Your flair for the dramatic here could give the wrong impression to
newer users of color management and people still using PS5. Of course PS6
is the way ICC color management SHOULD have been implemented in PS5 (thanks
to a lot of you, I'm sure!) but to say 5 was "wired wrong" and "didn't work"
is a little strong.
I don't think it is a good idea to write what is not technically
correct. Therefore, if I did not have good reason to say that PS5X is
useless, I wouldn't write it.
To illustrate how the bias in favour of PS5X works out on the ground,
at DRUPA 2000 a group from BURDA (: a leading European fashion
magazine) came up to the Newcolor / Linocolor folks with a bug report
that ran like this: 'We know that the right intent to select in CMYK
Setup in Photoshop is Perceptual. Newcolor / Linocolor doesn't match
the PS5 preview. Why are the Heidelberg applications not correctly
wired?'.
This is the universal assumption. Adobe can't be wrong. Therefore,
others must be wrong. But is this true? No, it's false.
a. CMYK Setup gave you the same intent from Lab to CMYK as from CMYK
to Lab. To let you proof on the fly, your software obviously must be
able to change the intent from CMYK to Lab. Since PS5X can't do this,
the CMYK preview function can correctly be judged broken.
a1. The workaround was first published by Florian Suessl of the ECI
here on this List. First select the Lab to CMYK intent in CMYK Setup,
then hard convert to CMYK, then revisit CMYK Setup and reset the
intent from CMYK to Lab. The preview CMYK option is now grayed out,
but you get an ICC CMYK preview.
b. The Space popup in the Print dialog was hardwired to Perceptual
from Lab to proofer CMYK. This means that you always displace colors
in the proofer space. This bug was published by Adobe here on the
List. Since PS5X can't give you a colorimetric transform from Lab to
proofer CMYK, proof printing can correctly be judged broken.
b1. The workaround is to use Profile to Profile, hard converting into
the proofer space right on the monitor instead of in the print stream
as Linocolor 5 and 6 did all along, and PS6 now does, too. Or as I
prefer to just use the Lab to CMYK part of the production profile in
PS5X by separating to CMYK, and then allowing an ICC color server
like BatchMatcher, BESTColor or now iQueue do the proofing transform
reliably. You can also just open the CMYK in Linocolor 6 using the
embedded CMYK profile, and then proof print from here.
c. PS5X always inserted a synthetic RGB device space (: a working
space) in the chain, even for CMYK and Lab data. This is illogical,
and the more so in that deselecting the monitor compensation button
in PS5X causes the synthetic RGB device values of the 'working space'
to be sent directly to the monitor, which is not what anybody could
possibly call color management. PS6 doesn't do either as Bruce Fraser
first reported to the List.
c1. Linocolor doesn't insert an RGB space in chain when previewing an
Lab original, nor does it allow you to desync Linocolor from the OS
mechanism that governs the monitor transform. This transform is
common to all applications you open on your system, so blowing this
transform is not a good idea. For editing profiles in the
ProfileEditor module of ProfileMaker, the manual recommends as a
workaround that you set the PS5X working space to simplified monitor
RGB so that the monitor space and the working space are roughly the
same. I know this defeats the PS5X concept of an RGB working space,
but then the concept is not all that logical to begin with.
Please let me know if, given the way PS5X works, you still think the
application is unfairly judged to be broken? Because to use it at
all, you have to know incredible unpublished workarounds which no
user I ever met masters.
The perception among companies who make and sell software seems to be
that print is dead, and that ICC color management, which is
print-related and requires both skill and expensive tools, which the
web doesn't (and that's also a saga soon with XML, Quark DMS, Sun and
the rest gearing up), just won't merit the cost of developer effort.
The fact is that print is where this industry makes its money, and
that ICC color management merits a lot more developer effort than it
is getting.
--
Henrik Holmegaard
TechWrite, Denmark