Category Archives: announce

LGM Vienna 2-5 May 2012

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The Libre Graphics Meeting is the annual event for open source creative graphics software. It greatly helps in improving the open source software stack through lots of talks, discussions, round tables, work shops and wonderful face to face meetings. There is always a great mixture of developers, artists, writers, translaters and interested people present, who come together in a very friendly and inclusive atmosphere. We had in the past always a OpenICC round table, when I was at LGM, and discussed various topics and planed around colour management. That should happen this year again with many ideas coming up.

To get people from all over the world to Europe, we need your help:

review!

Sirko has created another pledgie:

X Color Management 0.4 DRAFT1

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Some days ago on FOSDEM I gave a presentation about Colour Management in Compositors. At that point is was not very clear how to introduce colour management especially into the upcoming Wayland display server core and thus make it wide spread. The answer from Wayland developers is the same as from Xorg ones. They want a small core and colour management does not fit inside this.

As a result of a discussion between several colour management interested people from wayland, toolkits and me on the wayland IRC channel, we found a smallest common denominator. That will be a per window colour correction mechanism. The advantage is, it will be very easy to implement inside compositors and they can even start today about ICC support. The biggest disadvantage for applications is, they need to colour correct the whole window. That is as well the reason, why I did not like the idea in the past. Anyway, hopefully toolkits will jump in at one point and make that easy. Meanwhile we need to focus on example code, which demonstrates how per window colour correction can work.

The spec can be found as usual in the libXcm git repository. The main new part is the _ICC_COLOR_OUTPUTS atom and XcolorOutput structure.

SampleICC-1.6.6 + IccXML-0.9.6

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SampleICC provides an open source platform independent C++ library for reading, writing, manipulating, and applying ICC profiles along with applications that make use of this library.

IccXML provides a library and tools to convert between ICC profiles and XML in both directions.

SampleICC release obtained up to the actual revision 1.6.6 various bug fixes, build system improvements and the new iccGetBPCInfo tool.

OpenICC Program FOSDEM 4 + 5 February 2012 in Brussels, Belgium

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OpenICC uses 2012 a DevRoom at FOSDEM on Sunday together with Xorg people. The goal is to provide a meeting space for colour management topics.

The program is online on the OpenICC wiki. The talks will present and discuss colour management in Compositors, OpenICC, Scribus, Taxi DB, Oyranos and SVG2.

dispcalGUI supports online ICC Taxi DB

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Version 0.8.1.9 of the monitor profiling front end to Argyll CMS was released on 08.12.2011 with a new option to share profiles via the ICC Profile Taxi service hosted by openSUSE. dispcalGUI is thus the first application we know of supporting the online data base (DB). The Linux package is available on openSUSE and will be in the next update to the Oyranos Colour Management Live CD.

Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD III

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The third version of the Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD is based on openSUSE-12.1 and will run on x86_64 compatible PC´s. I placed the ISO image yesterday after some preparations on the better accessible SourceForge site for download. The CD project starts into a instantly colour managed desktop, which is unique under Linux.

The ICC desktop colour correction is done by the CompICC colour server. The LiveCD contains the usual mixture of colour managed graphics applications. Among them is the colour management system Oyranos, the KDE Color Management panel, a profiler based on Argyll CMS and many colour management aware applications for drawing, colour analysis and desktop publishing. Due to package size changes not even all programs from the last release are covered. I am very sorry for that. Nevertheless I decided to include Firefox, as a very wide spread every days application. After fixing a bug in Firefox, the web browser is usable under CompICC and has generally improved regarding colour management. But still it has many colour management related issues.

The desktop widget contains some test images to help you verifying, your desktop is setup correctly and works inside all colour managed applications. Covered are some JPEG, PNG, TIFF and SVG images with wide gamut and swapped channel test profiles. You will surely spot problems, as not everything in Linux desktops is really polished regarding colour management. But these test data can help you in getting a sense of, what can be relied on and what not. You can easily include other applications into your test by installing from openSUSE. And please help the projects and report bugs to the according project bug trackers. This will show interest in the issues seen with colour management and helps developers spot current weaknesses, which are otherwise overseen.

The CD uses the stable version of the Compiz compositing window manager, which is the only one being able to run under KDE. While the Oyranos CMS is packaged in openSUSE, a full screen desktop colour correction is currently not possible with KDE´s KWin or any window manager other than Compiz with the CompICC plugin. One difference to the previous LiveCD is a better useable nouveau driver, which since greatly improved and can now launch into Compiz with GPU acceleration.

Scarse Profile Library Warning

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Scarse is a project for profiling scanners under GPL based on Argyll code. It started in the old century and became pretty silent, with the last news dating from 2005. The project provides a nice collection of ICC profiles in the Scarse Profile Library, which is now used by some open source graphics packages. ICC profiles referring to standards are used to describe the exact colorimetry of a colour space. The ICC profiles are used to convert to and from other colour spaces in order to exchange with applications, services and customers. It is therefore crucial to meet these standards otherwise results will be incorrect right from the beginning and might render further colour work damaged.

Claudio Wilmanns revealed today a colorimetric imprecision inside the Scarse WideGamutRGB profile. Norman Koren hinted that the Scarse profiles do not pass a profile validation tool. OpenICC could never verify these profiles or how they where build and therefore did not cover any of them in its icc-profiles-openicc data set.

After these comments I like to warn of the usage and distribution of any of the Scarse Profiles for the sake of users trusting profiles of the affected packages in their workflows. We are looking for replacements for some of the most popular ones.

Affected Profiles are AdobeRGB, AppleRGB, WideGamutRGB, CIE-RGB, ECI-RGB, sRGB, KodakProPhotoRGB, ColorMatchRGB and more.

Affected Packages are libkdcraw. Some of the shared-color-profiles/Argyll ‘lcms’ generated profiles from the colord author use in parts the colorimetry of Scarse profiles. The later profiles are not included in the Argyll-1.1.0 source package. These profiles are at risk.

Disclaimer: the author, Kai-Uwe Behrmann, maintains the icc-profiles-openicc package containing ICC profiles describing colour standards.

OpenICC @ FOSDEM 4 + 5 February 2012 in Brussels, Belgium

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OpenICC can next year use a DevRoom at FOSDEM on Sunday together with Xorg people. The goal is to provide a meeting space for colour management topics.

Call for Talks:

So far we have one glue talk between Xorg and OpenICC, Scribus and PDF colour management, Taxi DB, OpenICC work and one about Oyranos CMS. We would be glad to see some more talks proposed related to colour management. If you think you could contribute a talk about your favorite project and user topic or get a interesting discussion rolling, then please get in contact with me.

Submission deadline is new year. We will middle January confirm accepted talks.

While OpenICC is usually much biased towards ICC ;-) , we feel obliged by the first part of our title and like to get in contact with people using other colour management standards as well and discuss all the overlapping topics. That could be movie or photography. Let´s make it happen. FOSDEM is told to be a good place for that.