Re: WCS, was: ICC update from Tom Lianza, Chairman ICC.
Re: WCS, was: ICC update from Tom Lianza, Chairman ICC.
- Subject: Re: WCS, was: ICC update from Tom Lianza, Chairman ICC.
- From: Chris Murphy <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:25:02 -0700
On Nov 17, 2010, at 12:59 AM, edmund ronald wrote:
> By the way, there is still an elephant in this room, namely Windows
> Color System - what is the status of that, and to what degree are
> Microsoft now prepared to interact with the ICC standards process?
For all practical purposes it's dead, because Microsoft has effectively abandoned it, at least for now. It's in the code, just like ICM, and there it will stay, possibly forever. But as far as active development, it's not happening. WCS 1.0 is very interesting from a bigger picture view, and I think we could learn some things about it. But in terms of implementing workflows is problematic because we don't have tools that even make it feasible to test how well it works, let alone actually implement a workflow. And even then it's a.) platform specific, and b.) fairly restricted to RGB only workflows, because of the limited ability to control CMYK separation parameters and no DeviceN support.
So active development would be required to pull it out of the nascent stage and get to a point where the ICC has been for some time.
But I think the team who came up with WCS, very seriously looked at the components and decided that it was in the best interest of users and future development to separate device behavior from transforms. I think that's an important distinction, even though within the ICC it's an old debate. There are inherent interoperability problems that arise as the result of ICC device profiles not exactly describing device behavior, but baked in transforms. That's something about ICC profiles that isn't immediately clear to even many advanced users is that "device profiles" imply a transform, not just device behavior. And possibly device behavior can't directly be determined with a device profile, it must be inferred.
Despite the ICC spec trying to ensure these transforms are unwindable, in practice they can only be unwound to get back to "measurement data" if a.) the transform was done correctly and in a documented manner in the first place, which often it is not; and b.) if he who wants to undo the transform clearly understands how that's supposed to be accomplished, which often he does not. And because present day CMMs are necessarily complex, as a profile builder you need to know how they're going to behave in order to ensure your profiles work correctly with the CMMs we've got and that too incentivizes profile builders to bake in transforms.
In other words, it's often not obvious how the device actually behaves, or how to deduce it. So we incorporate even more guesses into a framework that is billed as being interoperable, and a way to openly describe how devices behave. And the result is we do have colorimetric tables in output profiles that are massaged. And we have display profiles with improperly adapted primaries still.
As for Microsoft and ICC, I don't see color being a priority right now for either OS platform company. At least, not ICC based color. So I, for one, will not be surprised if Microsoft does not interact with the ICC in any meaningful way at all.
Chris Murphy _______________________________________________
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