Re: Colorconfiguration for Apple Apps / Tiger
Re: Colorconfiguration for Apple Apps / Tiger
- Subject: Re: Colorconfiguration for Apple Apps / Tiger
- From: Jan-Peter Homann <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 16:18:20 +0200
Hello Eric, hello list
I´m doing colormanagement betatesting and troubleshooting since the days
of the first Mac II.
(in this time colormanagement was not ICC-based...)
From my point of view, the colormanagement-implementation in Tiger and
the Apple apps are a brilliant example, what mistakes a OS-vendor can make.
I´m seriously thinking to offer a seminar at the ICC-developers meeting
in November with the title:
"The Tiger disaster, learning from the mistakes of Apple"
--
What should Apple change in the next versions of MacOSX and their own
applications:
1. Transparency, transparency, transparency
------------------------------------------
Apple has more or less hidden the colormanagement for their own apps,
the printer-driver an PDF-generation via printing dialogue.
For the professional user, it is essential to know:
- which profiles are assigned for untagged data ?
- in which cases are profiles embedded during saving / exporting files
- in which cases are automatic colorconversion triggered ?
- what are the rules for such conversion ?
- How can the user change the rules ?
- How interferes the OS with applications and printerdrivers during
printing ?
- How interferes the OS with applications and printerdrivers during
PDF-export via the printer-driver ?
1. Give us back the central colorsettings
-----------------------------------------
Every colormanagement aware OS and application needs a colorsetting,
which describes, how untagged data are handled.
The idea to hardwire this colorsetting for MacOSX and the Apple apps is
mad. Give us immediately back the colorsync control panel.
2. More control for the advanced user
-------------------------------------
Actually, the advanced user has often no choice to specify rendering
intents for e.g. softproofing or printing.
For the handling of PDF for printing, it is necessary to make clever use
of the output-intent.
For displaying PDF/X-1a data, the output-intent should always be used
and the user should have the possibility to get an info, what the
profile is.
For dealing with untagged CMYK-data, the OS should assign a CMYK-profile
temporarily for softproof and printing and inform the user, what profile
is used. For saving/exporting PDF-data, deviceCMYK, data MUST NOT (!!!)
converted to ICCbasedCMYK. Instead, the temporarily assigned profile
should be embedded as output-intent.
The PDF-Export should also have the option "Save as PDF/X-1a" In this
case, deviceCMYK is untouched, and ICCbased colorspaces are converted to
the actual CMYK-workingspace. This profile is embedded as output-intent.
For dealing with colortransformations, the user should have control over
every application, where such colortransformations can happen. He should
be able to specify rendering intents, if he wants.
If an application is using a default rendering intent from the source or
destination-profile for colortransformations, the application / OS
should be able to always use blackpoint compensation, with the default
intent is relative colorimetric.
For building professional PDF-colorservers, it should be easy to use
devicelink-profiles as quartz-filters.
This are are my 50 ct, for an colormanagement-aware OS, which addresses
the needs for graphic arts professionals.
:-) Jan-Peter
Erik Koldenhof wrote:
Jan-Peter,
As you problably know, Tiger changed everything on ColorSync handling.
Because the ColorSync preferences are no longer there, everything is
set to 'Generic' profiles when no embedded profiles are available, and
it cannot be changed.
I even tried to change the default profiles to better standards via
Applescript and Terminal scripts, but the defaults are gone i'm affraid.
One other issue in Tiger is the lack of ICC v4 support, which Apple did
support before Tiger.
Just check the ICC v4 testpage on www.color.org and you'll see.
The only thing you can/should do at this time, is to try to actually
embed a real profile into the image.
Preview app runs via ColorSync as well, and still can handle PDF/X-3
color info more or less OK, but I believe PDF/X-1a is also handled via
the 'default' profiles...
iPhoto now accepts embedded profiles, but converts the image towards
'GenericRGB' when you edit the file (rotating, color corrections, etc).
So, there are some serious issues with Tiger still, I'm sure we haven't
found them all yet...
--
homann colormanagement ------ fon/fax +49 30 611 075 18
Jan-Peter Homann ------------- mobile +49 171 54 70 358
Kastanienallee 71 ------- http://www.colormanagement.de
10435 Berlin --------- mailto:email@hidden
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