On Sat, Nov 30, 2019 at 7:59 PM <graxx(a)videotron.ca> wrote:
> I wish to better understand the issue that Florian spoke to Apple about,
> "... custom XYZLUT display profiles that meet spec but make MacOS glitch
> out". I'll have to research this on DisplayCAL, perhaps it is documented?
> Could this every be fixed?
>
> I'm not advocating for either Microsoft or Apple or Argyll or DisplayCAL,
> I'm not surprised Apple may have changed things to make their lives
> simpler, or honestly screwed things up badly for developers.
>
> Which side are you on, anyway?
>
> / Roger
I'm not on any side. I'm fascinated by the subject. I don't work for anyone
pertaining to this subject. It's important to me as an amateur.
In a nutshell, you can create XYZLUT profiles using DisplayCal on MacOS and
the OS will let you select them in the Displays > Color panel without
complaint then various Apple-supplied programs will just render your
graphics completely wrong.
Adobe works.
Complaining to Apple is unproductive, and Florian had to put a caveat into
the DisplayCal UI to tell users to avoid that style of profile on Mac.
I suggested he take it up over here at the "Apple Colorsync Mailing List"
though he was doubtful, noting that this list is mostly talk about
prepress.
As I was looking more into the matter, my experience is that depending on
the profile I use on my up-to-date Mac, I get subtly different renderings
depending on which software I use to work with graphics, even when all are
supposed to be color-managed!
I wrote these concerns up (not very well) and submitted them on this forum
a few months ago, but no one here cares about Colorsync anymore. You guys
all use Windows, OMG. Who knows why Apple even keeps this list around any
more> Maybe because this place used to be a hotbed of well-informed and
adventurous discussion, back when good 'ol Bruce Fraser was writing clear
tracts about how to make color management work in the "real world". (The
Epson Inkjet list was also a great forum, back in the day),
So, having watched this stuff evolve for decades, I'm dumbfounded that for
most users, color-management still is a complete mystery of behaviors, and
more complex than ever. Kind of like the American commonwealth.
I've no axe to grind re platforms. I work with Mac, Windows and Linux (I
lived through the Unix Wars and done systems programming for novel
super-computer architectures on Unix. And I've done tons of IT for these
platforms. My personal systems are Apple (and VMs for the others), because
I found Mac most elegant around time of Centris 650 when I bought my first
home system, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And the desktop
publishing revolution belonged to Mac. I hate Microsoft as a general rule.
Now everyone hates Apple. I see history sort of repeating i(it never really
does) with iOS and Android. It pleases me that Microsoft (Balmer) thought
phones were stupid in 2007 and a market not worth pursuing, and when they
discovered how wrong Balmer was tried to re-invent Windows the mobile
wworld just rejected them. Meanwhile Mac had gone Darwin. Saying yes to
Android is saying please hijack my mobile and dox me for ransom, unless
it's Android straight from Google.
But I'm not invested in seeing any platform succeed or fail. My heart
really lives with Richard Stallman's philosophy and work. Industry always
thought he was a villain because he advocated that ordinary people should
take interest in and ownership of tech that's crucial to their futures.
So I returned to this list because I found DisplayCal, thought it's
completely awesome, find the people working on it a super intelligent and
well-informed, and when they said they ran into a problem that affects my
platform of choice, I figured I should at least come over here and make a
stab at seeing whether there's any traction with Apple to get it fixed.
Along way, over at DisplayCal forums, I'm socratically learning about new
trends in color and trying to connect these to old interests. Two of my
favorite topics are Charles Poyton's wonderful expositions on the
importance of understanding gamma—I can remember a guy named Timo who
called out problems with non-unity gamma-encoded working spaces and RGB
blending in Photoshop and how everyone thought he was a crank because he
advocated high-bit linear light editing. A long time later, Adobe added a
"Blending Mode Gamma" option to Photoshop. Good work Timo! There was a guy
named Dan M. who taught photoshop CMYK by the numbers and he went through a
phase where he taught all these prepress guys to "Move to Lab" in Photoshop
under an 8-bit regime. Completely unaware that Lab coding efficiency is
about %35 percent. Dan was a stickler for quality, but he had no problem
that a single editing move could throw have of the information away. And
there was endless struggling with platform-dependent color-rendering
differences, especially re Epson. Andrew Rodney will no doubt recall this
sort of stuff.
My current peeve is the denigration of sRGB. It's a color-space that makes
so much sense. And I'm super excited about new wide-gamut displays, and
more color. At same time I see how these have been such a can of worms for
so many early adopters. There's an amateur GIMP aficionado—I can't recall
her name at moment—who has some great web write-ups on about how when you
say sRGB, it's not even clear what you're talking about because there are
numerous profiles circulating define it differently. Holy cow! And she has
this great tract about how you can have a wide-gamut display that can claim
Adobe RGB coverage, but actually significantly not cover sRGB. I thrive on
these sorts of contentions, where when you study a matter and talk it
through, community understanding evolves. (If I were better at math, I
would've been all over the quantum mechanics revolution and the conundrum
of the two-slit experiment, and quantum computing!) And what's a "quantum
dot"(R)(TM) OLED technology? Etc.
Anyway I have fun think about this stuff and never mind bones of
contention. I love the feeling of when I think I understand something and
I'm wrong! And also Of course, I'm sometimes just stupidly wrong, like
everybody.
BTW—I liked your graph of the 2D coverage for the new NEC, P3, Adobe and
NTSC. Thanks for taking the time.
And happy to see you over at DisplayCal forum. That SW is super great and
it's a lively spot.