Re: Printing with No Color Management, Apple and X-Rite
Re: Printing with No Color Management, Apple and X-Rite
- Subject: Re: Printing with No Color Management, Apple and X-Rite
- From: Chris Murphy <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:57:11 -0600
On Apr 14, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Doyle Yoder wrote:
> This brings up some interesting questions. All the apps like Indesign, Quark, ColorMunki, i1Profiler, etc. that do not use Apple's new printing path have no problem with turning off Colorsync/CM in the printer driver.
Nothing actually turns off ColorSync in the print driver. There is a private SPI a handful of applications use to in effect do two things:
1. It enables the creation of a particular kind of PDF print spool file that has both source profiles (per object) and a destination profile. It is the responsibility of the app to ensure, if it wants to disable ColorSync, to make sure source=destination to cause a null transform to occur. The only "off" switch for ColorSync is the null transform.
2. It informs the OS/manufacturer print driver to flip it's color print mode to the manufacturer's recommended ICC profile print mode: called "Off - No Color Adjustment" or application manages colors (sp?) for HP drivers, etc.
That's it. #2 was developed to prevent "double color management" a bit of a misnomer. What's meant is to prevent proprietary color management based on an assumed sRGB source space, while also using ICC profiles (canned or custom or printing profile targets).
What is a very fair point is that so long as the end user takes manual responsibility for task #2, InDesign, QuarkXPress, ColorMunki, i1Profiler, and numerous other applications, DO NOT HAVE the problems that we routinely see happening with color management and printing with the applications that use the private SPI, ostensibly to make our lives easier.
>
> If any of these etc. ever become 64-bit apps they will have to use Apple's new printing path won't they?
Some of those apps are QuickDraw apps. And they inherit certain legacy behaviors that make the disabling of ColorSync (with a bogus null transform mechanism) much easier than it is for non-Quickdraw apps. It is my understanding a 64-bit app must be Cocoa, and will not have access to QuickDraw, and so if it wants to disable ColorSync it may not be so easy. If this is true, and if it will be necessary for QuarkXPress or InDesign to use kPMApplicationColorMatching, I predict a complete utter cl*sterf|ck. We're talking about 100's to 1000's of objects potentially for these applications. They do not directly produce the PDF print spool file, this is done through APIs, which can produce their own unique objects in the PDF print spool. So it's entirely possible the app unwittingly produces objects it doesn't know it needs to tag with some bogus ICC profile in order to tell ColorSync to do a null transform.
In my view, kPMApplicationColorMatching needs to accept *one* profile from the application, and then Quartz PDF Context writes out the PDF print spool file with all objects source space as /DeviceRGB (we are talking about inkjet printers primarily, with manufacturer drivers, therefore they are RGB devices; these problems don't occur with CMYK as /DeviceCMYK is allowed and is passthrough, whereas /DeviceRGB is presently banned on Mac OS). And then uses that single profile from the application as the OutputIntent.
That gives Apple the ability to do soft proofing in Preview.app and it is also an explicit signal for 100% guaranteed pass through, NOT null transform, exempting the entire PDF spool file from even going near ColorSync for parsing the PDF for objects to color manage (or not). Vastly more reliable. Tried and true PDF/X-3 (or X-4 or X-5) workflow.
>
> Is Apple going to continue to allow these apps to not use Apple's new printing path and or for how long? How long will Apple keep that option available.
I'm reasonably certain anything Carbon is dead. That's a 32bit world. 64-bit going forward is all Cocoa.
Chris _______________________________________________
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