Re: Colorsync Architecture
Re: Colorsync Architecture
- Subject: Re: Colorsync Architecture
- From: Nick Wheeler <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2003 13:53:08 -0500
On Saturday, December 20, 2003, at 04:48 PM, John Fieber wrote:
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but it looks like between the idiot and
the professional we have a gaping hole. This is where folks like
slightly more advanced amateur photographers (eg. me) fit. Not being
a "professional" this stuff is a big enough financial black hole as it
is without having to fork over a professional sized wad of money to
get decent color when I don't really need most of what a high end RIP
offers. I just need:
Hi John:
First off - the hole is not "gaping". I started a thread titled
"Linearizing the Epson Printer" some time ago in which I stated that
after 18 months of exploring various alternatives I had finally
concluded the best way to profile the Epsons at that time was in
photorealistic mode, and that profiling the printers in "No color
adjustment" state seemed to actually produce worse results. Of course
there was a huge debate about this, but the fact remained that simply
using Photo Realistic worked very well. It actually worked quite well
without a profile conversion at all.
In fact I have many friends locally, in particular two fine art
photographers and a well regarded commercial photographer who use photo
realistic to this day. Please understand they use photorealistic
without profiles, just block stock out of the box Epson photorealistic
mode, push print and go. The prints are very good and sold to happy and
discriminating commercial clients and art buyers all the time.
In fact if I spent less time fiddling with perfection and more time
doing the work maybe I would be able to sell as much work as these guys
do! Unfortunately I exist at the lunatic fringe.
1. A simple way to print a calibration target
2. A simple way to select a profile and rendering intent when printing
from any application
3. A simple way for photoshop to take over color management in
printing if I want it to
It is just not simple. Most end users will end up with worse results
trying to make their own profiles than if they stick with
premanufactured workflows. What I am implying is those results will
only get better if we stop making the perfect the enemy of the good.
For custom profiles to work "perfectly" the printer has to be held in a
calibrated state, and recalibrated prior to every important print run.
To get to "perfect" requires an understanding of proper calibration as
well as screening, tone response curves, ink limiting, k generation and
gray component replacement and the rest that is way way beyond the
abilities of most end users. It also requires the necessary software
and hardware to perform all these functions.
The manufacturers know how to do this stuff and it's up to the OS to
stay out of their way and make it as simple as possible for them to do
the code right and make it transparent for the end user. And it is
plausible to assume these same manufacturers might want to lock the end
user into their stuff. Competition will inevitably drive quality up and
cost down.
If an end user wants control over all this stuff, I consider it to be a
separate job than what we should be asking of the simple print drivers,
the OS, or the graphics applications to be doing.
It was really the same in the traditional wet process analog world of
photography. Many practitioners were perfectly happy using films,
chemistry and paper manufactured by others. There was a small subset
that were unhappy with this approach and would mix their own chemistry,
coat their own film and paper and even make their own cameras.
Most professionals stopped printing their images altogether and relied
on other experts to do it for them. Is that something we have to
relearn?
I digress.
The irregularities that you, Chris and Bruce Fraser are alluding to are
just flat unacceptable and are due to the fact that the Color
Management Architecture in OS X has become a huge unwieldy mess. The
reason it has become a mess is it is trying to be all things to all
people and that is flat impossible. Chris Murphy has the solution
absolutely right, keep it simple. SimpleRGB. John Z is right, get rid
of the colorsync preferences pane altogether.
Initially Apple thought it would provide an architecture where end
users could put all their color preferences in one place that the
applications could call, meanwhile Microsoft did not. So the
independant application developers made the color preference calls
application specific, while Apple wrote it's apps to call the
preference pane. Add to this that in OS X the printer driver
architecture now calls profiles differently and the they are buried in
a place where no one can find them, meanwhile application developers
are still layering colorsync calls "to convert to profile" in the print
driver as though none of this was happening.... well you get the idea.
The potential for chaos has increased exponentially.
Best wishes,
Nick Wheeler
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