Re: Printing with No Color Management (again)
Re: Printing with No Color Management (again)
- Subject: Re: Printing with No Color Management (again)
- From: Chris Murphy <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:43:58 -0600
On Apr 16, 2011, at 4:51 PM, MARK SEGAL wrote:
> Chris, I'd appreciate if you could unpack some of this for us.
> The Mac OSX printing problem: is this the one whereby disabling colour management isn't possible without the Chan or Adobe workaround? Or is there something else too?
> "There are other problems with Windows": what are they in the context of making prints or processing photos in general?
> What do you mean by a "CUPS" problem - not familiar with the term.
> What is the nature of the "ideological choice"? Why should a system developer let "ideology" get in the way or usability? I'm curious about this one.
> You say they want "color management to behave in a certain way". What is that way, and how does it differ from the way you would normally want colour management to behave? Again curious about this.
> "System is fragile and prone to these printing problems". Fragile in what ways - i.e. what does it take to knock it - and by "these printing problems", what problems exactly are you referring to - the "no colour management issue", or are there others? I'd like to know so I can avoid getting myself into trouble.
> You predict "they" will continue to happen - why? Is it the opt-out method of colour management, if so what about it that causes other trouble of what kind?
> There's something ironic about the fact that Apple/Mac was once considered the "only" system for proper colour management, and now it appears people may be looking at Windows as a less troublesome option for managing a print workflow.
OK so I've thought about this for a few days, tried writing a few rough drafts, and I'm dissatisfied with all of them. I made many assumptions in the posts complaining about printing reliability on Mac OS, for users who depend on ICC workflow, and that's why it was as short as it was (and they weren't that short). So while I'm not beyond a producing a more thorough explanation, with fewer assumptions about the reader, it then gets really long because I have to explain things most users have no reason to understand.
"The problem(s)" are all happening at a lower level of the OS than users ever get near. I might have no choice but to one day undertake writing such a document. But it misses the real issues:
Printing on Mac OS for professionals/prosumers, who depend on ICC based workflows is unreliable and inconsistent. Only Apple can make it better. I refuse the argument this is the tort of Epson, Canon, HP, Adobe, or any other developer who writes code on Mac OS. These same parties write code on Windows, and users of ICC based workflows have not had these problems over the same time period, at all, on that platform.
I think Apple can have everything they want, but merely tweak the opt-out mechanism such that there is no longer any question that an entire PDF print spool file's contents are color management exempt.
And for the more technical people who will understand this: Any application that uses kPMApplicationColorMatching should cause Quartz PDF Context to write out a uniform PDF Print spool file, and I think Apple needs to revisit the ban on /DeviceRGB when this SPI is being used by applications that need to use it. There is nothing gained by banning /DeviceRGB, there's no loss of functionality to bring it back. But it is a very standard, well tested method to defined objects immune to color management when directed to the intended output, while still allowing soft proofing such content.
Conversely, banning /DeviceRGB means routinely even when kPMApplicationColorMatching is called by an application, ColorSync is behind the scenes still parsing that PDF to determine null transforms on a per object basis. That's inherently fragile. I can think of no examples where it's a good idea for this SPI to function on an object by object basis. The fall out of which is we continue to have, in my opinion, an unacceptably inconsistent printing experience on Mac OS X. For at least the past seven years. Intermittently.
Chris Murphy _______________________________________________
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