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home :: cinepaint :: cinepaint_2007.04.13_1.html
Fri, 13 Apr 2007
0.22-1 tasks for Oyranos
Now that the release of CinePaint is out, some things come clearer or simply more evident for handling colour management with Oyranos.
Gray default profile
One thing is the a missing default profile for gray images. I am now adding this to Oyranos. Without it would be incomplete.
Maximum conformity
The other thing is the missing policy display. If I remember correctly something like a first warn message should be implemented. But it seems difficult for a user to understand such messages the first time. Let me explain a bit more. Once Oyranos is installed and CinePaint runs all comes smoothly. A PNG is opened and and gets a default profile assigned. As the Home+Office policy is the first active one. It will be sRGB for untagged data. Fine. The user tweaks that and saves. Now a tiff comes its way and opens nicely, editing, saving. No problem. After sending to a agency they phone and say it was degraded from their accepted WhateverRGB to sRGB. Now what? No message appeared. Repeating the same in CinePaint and looking now carefully on the windows top border, one can observe that there is sRGB right from the beginning.
Thats not possible. CinePaint degrades an image and this silently. Where is the professionalism?
You can imagine, this will provoke many colour people.
Indeed Oyranos first hand policy is a keep it simple policy. Convert all to sRGB and make all the same right from the beginning. The intention is to help that many users without colour ambitions to work without the need to understand colour management. Once a image is loaded in a Oyranos compliant application, every other applicatin should handle colours fine. This is a maximum of compatibility.
For colour people it is simple to change this. In Oyranos' control panel, called by oyranos-config-fltk, one has simply to switch from Home+Office to say Photographer. It is in the first tab. Now your image data are handled much more carefully. No colour space degradiation to sRGB, and a bigger default editing colour space is now active.
The dilema is about making it really good for both unexperienced and high level users. Policies can help to satisfy many different groups. And in the future one can simply create its own policy. But a application author is under pressure to provide success right from the beginning.
The question which arises is, how should a default for a fresh installation be formed? What is acceptable for all as a first start?
/cinepaint | 3 comments | permanent link |