Re: Setting default RGB in OS X 10.4?
Re: Setting default RGB in OS X 10.4?
- Subject: Re: Setting default RGB in OS X 10.4?
- From: Chris Murphy <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 14:11:22 -0600
On May 4, 2005, at 11:11 PM, joel wrote:
And gasp...
...It just baffles me that appears to me to be a simple color
architecture can be blithered about on assumptions everyone wants to
use pissy, small, extinct colorspaces.
That doesn't really explain what's going on, in my view.
We need a system wide default to use as an assumed source profile for
anything untagged. Apple thinks it should be Generic RGB, rather than
what the rest of the world uses for untagged RGB—sRGB. It's not
irrational for Apple to use Generic RGB as a source for untagged files
*if* the assumption is that those untagged files are being made on a
Macintosh using a legacy gamma. But due to the legacy gamma issue, and
simultaneously not long ago ensuring apps *always* embed profiles in at
least RGB images, Apple has created ambiguity in untagged files.
Next, an assumption was made as to how the Default profile settings
were being used. The assumption: as assumed source profiles. However
Nikon Capture is different in that it uses them as assumed destination
profiles to convert to (depending on the mode).
I see no intention to cause conversion into pissy, small, exinct color
spaces (except when printing, under certain circumstances).
I don't like the legacy 1.8 gamma, and wish Apple would have dumped it
with OS X. Surely a number of people with a untagged images would have
noticed a difference in their images between OS 9 and the new OS X, and
it would have been a bit of a problem for a while. But that would have
been four years ago. Ancient history. Anyone who really cared about
continuity would have used AppleScript or some other application to
intentionally tag those file so they weren't ambiguous anymore.
But that opportunity is now gone, and I think something more elegant
and creative needs to be thought up if we're to solve this untagged RGB
dilemma. We can't just have an OS update that takes out gamma 1.8, in
favor of 2.2. The first and most important step is to get rid of all
these damn applications that save RGB files without embedded profiles.
There are any number of culprits who so this even by default. There's
even a preset in Adobe apps, easy to set, that causes them to *by
default* not embed profiles in RGB files. Bad!
What about step 2? Can we find an acceptable way to get untagged files
to be tagged? This is tricky. It could be done with an update to the
OS, where a daemon runs around and tags every untagged image with the
display's currently set display profile. This represents how the user
sees the file now anyway. It may not be the ideal profile to use for
editing purposes, but again we're talking about the masses of users,
not professionals who should have already tagged their images. But what
about workstations used for web design, with large numbers of folders
containing images for the web? We can't have those automatically
tagged. A creative solution to this problem would be nice so we can one
day dump Generic RGB (and eventually we'll be dumping sRGB also), as
well as this legacy Mac gamma.
Anyway, back to Nikon Capture. While it launches fine, it's lost
necessary functionality for professional use on OS X 10.4. Nikon needs
to provide an update for it to work properly on OS X 10.4. Apple has
had builds of Tiger available for developers for some time. That's
Nikon's opportunity to make itself aware of this issue well in advance
of the Tiger ship date. And as a supplement, hopefully Apple has a
mechanism to send a notice for a change such as this to the developers
it would likely affect, including Nikon.
Chris Murphy
Color Remedies (TM)
www.colorremedies.com/realworldcolor
-------------------------------------------------------------
Co-author "Real World Color Management, 2nd Edition"
Published by PeachPit Press (ISBN 0-321-26722-2)
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