LGM 2012 talks

Posted on March 12, 2012 by oyranos

As mentioned in a post before, the Libre Graphics Meeting will be held in Vienna from 2th until 5th of May this 2012. I have now submitted my talks and will hopefully know in some days if they are accepted.

Colour Management a la Greek: will give a overview about some technical concepts for platform independent color management systems.
Evolving Concepts for Colour Management: will summarise the ongoing ideas and discussions on the freedesktop working group OpenICC.

Like in the years before, there is a chance to meet with students of the upcoming Google Summer of Code projects.

Sirko submitted Taxi DB – Call A Cab To Bring The Colors: which describes the idea behind the ICC profile database and hopefully we getting some feedback and ideas, on how to make sure, that the quality of the profiles will be high.

Markus Raab has submitted a talk about Elektra, which is used as DB API by Oyranos. I hope that will show new lively developments in Elektra

I am sure the self-styled competitor will also be around and give an talk about his view on color management.

If we can get to useful work on specs on a OpenICC round table for the sake of cross desktop compatibility, then even better.

Not directly related to colour management but nonetheless interesting, I was pointed to a project called Tupi. Tupi was forked by Gustav Gonzalez from KToon. KToon made no noticeable progress since he left the project in 2010.

Gustav likes to attend the Libre Graphics Meeting, but he needs some support to get there. We should help him, so that he can meet Boudewijn Rempt and some others from Krita, who can help him to find his way to the KDE community. But he needs some money for travelling. And there are still some other requests for generosity I mentioned before.

Tupi	Libre Graphics Meeting	Tatica

Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is coming along nicely and will surely become again a cool event for the FLOSS community. LGM is this year co-located with the Linuxwochen Vienna and their Call for Papers is still open until 1st of April.

ICC Examin-0.51 released

Posted on March 8, 2012 by oyranos

ICC Examin Version 0.51 is a feature release. The package newly explores into window and OpenGL colour correction and contains bug fixes.

Changes overview:

new on the fly large gamut intermediate ICC profile
new let a colour server colour correct OpenGL
new Oyranos colour corrects report window on CPU
fix regression in file observation
require Oyranos 0.4.0

About:
ICC Examin is a small utility (unix name: iccexamin) for the purpose of watching the internals of ICC v2 and v4 profiles, measurement data (CGATS), colour samples (named colour profiles), gamut visualisations (vrml) and video card gamma tables (Xorg/XFree86/osX).

ChangeLog Version 0.51
http://www.oyranos.org/scm?p=icc_examin.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/tags/0.51

Thanks:
Thanks to all contributors and bug reporters.

git	git://www.oyranos.org/git/icc_examin
git sha1:	90c55f1a141f17c9cdd1b1e9ae0723306351cc5e
package:	http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/oyranos/ICC Examin/ICC Examin 0.50/icc_examin-0.51.tar.bz2
size:	579532 Byte
sha1sum:	88b951879f304add2670630bd3d0632a0dd39ff7 icc_examin-0.51.tar.bz2
md5sum:	e2db40c31596ba2d08cd2612de496289 icc_examin-0.51.tar.bz2
Linux RPM:	http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/multimedia:/color_management/

Oyranos-0.4.0 released

Posted on March 8, 2012 by oyranos

The new version of the colour management system Oyranos is released. Version 0.4.0 is a feature and bug fix release.

Changes Overview:

new list Taxi DB profiles for a local monitor
new download and install ICC profiles from Taxi DB
fix HDMI2 XRandR EDID
new widget classes to image_display for per window CM
new add oyranos-monitor-daemon script
switch to libXcm 0.5.0 for X Color Management support

About:
Oyranos is a colour management system allowing to share various settings across applications and services. The provided interfaces are the C library, native graphical front ends and partitial access through command line tools. The library is licensed under newBSD.

Known Applications using Oyranos:
ICC Examin, the KDE Kolor Manager and Synnefo configuration dialogs, the CompIcc colour server and more.

ChangeLog:
http://www.oyranos.org/scm?p=oyranos.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/tags/0.4.0

Thanks to all contributors and bug reporters.

git	git://www.oyranos.org/git/oyranos
git sha1:	97e01081831eb129cdea67c2c2b1acf23478cf8a
package:	http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/oyranos/Oyranos/Oyranos 0.4/oyranos-0.4.0.tar.bz2
size:	1265839 Byte
sha1sum:	4841e1271a24071600494fc0c1281c65b007de76 oyranos-0.4.0.tar.bz2
md5sum:	4ec2c728c5ca7d450c47d95405de3ade oyranos-0.4.0.tar.bz2
Linux RPM:	http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/multimedia:/color_management/

KDE End to End Colour Management

Posted on March 2, 2012 by oyranos

The last blog posts about KDE and colour management might have been irritating about what actual happens on colour managed desktops. Here come some clarifications and thoughts from the Oyranos CMS maintainer. The project name starts with Oy (Oyranos like sky), hence my nick oy on IRC

Colour Management Systems (CMS) are a precondition to do colour correction of input and output devices. But this is not sufficient for having a colour corrected desktop. The claim was made, that Gnome is the first colour managed desktop on Linux. But Gnomes window manger mutter has no means to use ICC profiles. The same is true for all other window managers with an exception of old Compiz. A CMS selects only the needed ICC profile and does the configuration in that field. But the background, applications like the dock and most others are not colour corrected by standard ICC profiles mechanisms in Linux. The only thing users can do since many years on Linux is to do monitor calibration setup per single channel. This helps for better grayscale, but not for compensating of colour gamuts. Calibration is only a first step, but not sufficient for ICC colour correction. So Gnome users have today no colour corrected desktop like all other Linux users.

What is needed to get to a End to End colour corrected desktop in KDE? A more general Overview can be found here.

KWin needs ICC support, in order to colour correct the KDE desktop in a reasonable time frame. That will help with the output side in a fast way by using the GPU during compositing while using few resources. If you feel it is time to do something, here is a Google Summer of Code CM project idea for KWin. With my experience from the CompICC project, I would be glad to help any such project.
An other project I would find really helpful is to provide colour correction to KDE’s primary image viewer gwenview. If people could help with a hackfest, that would be cool. We have such thing in mind and some ideas about, maybe you like to join us.
Qt/KDE needs to explore how to do own fast colour correction of a complete window to be prepared for the future. Here are two project ideas.
OpenICC did investigate to get print colour management right. There are currently two approaches who are promising. OpenICC has one project idea to introduce colour managed printing into Krita and one for user profile setup for colour managed print queues with KolorManager. These are two complementing, maintainable and robust paths for getting printing CM right.

Now some clarifications about Oyranos itself, as in the kde-planet where many wrong statements transported intermixed with half true claims.

Core is a toolkit independent library
KDE, Qt and FLTK front ends exist like KolorManager. Other native ones are possible.
The Elektra API and library is used for format independent configuration DB access.
Oyranos is planed to switch to a OpenICC JSON DB format to converge with ArgyllCMS and other interested CMS’es
Oyranos is a cross platform project
A DBus API would be welcome on top of the basic library but not in its core
Oyranos forces no one to use the CPU or prohibit to use the GPU
The CMS provides means to do optional multi monitor colour correction and other conversions.
CompICC uses Oyranos and does colour correction on the GPU
Oyranos developers belief in collaboration
Self containment in Oyranos results from adhering to and work on interoperable standards.
User configurations belong to users in Oyranos, so it needs no special root rights, which exposes security and privacy risks.
Oyranos provides optional policies for grouping single settings. That is a additional feature not a limitation.
Oyranos uses many advanced automatism’s to do it’s work successful
The CMS is designed to work with default settings.
Advanced manual configurations are supported and part of Oyranos’ user centrism.
Oyranos cares about quality and requires a careful selected and peer reviewed profile set that comes with no Fakes and no wrong colorimetry.
Licensing fits most open source and commercial projects with a newBSD style license.

Choice is a good thing for users. As a CMS author I have no problems, that an other CMS comes to KDE too on Linux. Many Linux CM standards I initiated or helped with allow for such interoperability, which is in the spirit of the ICC standard.

LGM Vienna 2-5 May 2012

Posted on February 20, 2012 by oyranos

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:

Sirko has created another pledgie:

X Color Management 0.4 DRAFT1

Posted on February 17, 2012 by oyranos

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.

Linux Printing

Posted on February 15, 2012 by oyranos

Colour managed printing under Linux relies on several components to play nicely together. Linux has the great lcms Colour Management Module (CMM) to parse ICC profiles and apply colour transformations based on those. The standard print job PDF can have source ICC profiles attached. CUPS knows about per print queue server side configured output ICC profiles. If feet with the correct settings by the according colour managing print filters, Ghostscript does a great job with the provided information at producing colour corrected raster output using lcms. That output is further processed by the printer driver and spooled by CUPS to the physical device.

PDF contains most often colour values defined in DeviceRGB, which is a very short way to specify some colour. And you know programmers are lazy and simply use that. So Ghostscript does a trick to colour manage these documents nonetheless and assumes DeviceRGB to be meant as sRGB, which is in this situation kind of the best it can do.

But DeviceRGB being handled as sRGB blocks practically two important use cases.

Advanced application might want to do colour management early inside the application.Think of proofing and other specialised tasks done by designers and PrePress studios.
Profilers, the applications which create ICC in the first place need targets to be printed without any colour correction. This case is vital to being able to setup colour management at all for new devices, media and drivers by creating valid ICC profiles. It affects owners of colour measurement devices for printers and if they publish their ICC profiles most other users too.

Fortunately there is a way to specify a output device profile per job, which is the way CUPS is designed to be used from client side. Comparably a per session based user device profile introduces a high risk to interfere with standard profile selection mechanisms and concurrenting sessions and is pretty limited in scope. The PDF/X standard allows to embed a output profile inside the document. That way all colour management is completely defined inside the PDF per job and can bypass any unwanted server side magic. The mechanism is called OutputIntent. Applications and print dialogs can use the OutputIntent in order to reliably send device Rgb or Cmyk through a colour management wise non intercepted printing path.

However, manipulation of existing PDF files is not that easy. Thankfully Joseph Simon has put some work into a project called Color-Managed Printing eXtension or short libCmpx. The library handles the harder parts of embedding a ICC output profile into a PDF/X and assists with profile selection. His primary design goal for the libCmpx library is to help enabling colour management in print dialogs. The origin of the project lays in the XCPD Google Summer of Code 2011 project for the OpenICC group.

ICC wants streamlined workflows

Posted on February 7, 2012 by oyranos

The ICC meeting from 30th January to 1th February was again a great chance to meet with colour management people in person. The meeting was hosted in Munich at Adobe with a great view over the snowy city. I joined the sessions under the OpenICC umbrella to represent the open source community.

Of course many talks went over various specification topics and coordination with other standard bodies and groups of interest in colour exchange. But as ICC is evolving, there are new topics coming up as well.

Notably, ICC is slowly moving from a solely static colour content description of what colours are. There is great interest to cover as well the process of applying colour conversions. This covers necessarily definition of terms and workflows and gets to the questions of why, how and who handles colour. This will help users to do high level decisions as opposed to the current need to understand low level technical ICC terms and figuring out how that applies to actual used implementations.

I presented my work inside OpenICC to add monitor identification and calibration state information inside ICC profiles to streamline profile distribution and installation. The concept found support and the presentation about the meta tag keys came along nicely.

ICC members dive currently into spectral imaging, which is prototyped in SampleICC. I appreciate this direction, as it very likely simplifies the use of spectral readings for colour calculations in applications.

The only discussed hint to reduce the size of n-channel profiles, was work on how to put formulas inside the colour processing pipe. It would be great if that comes to a useful result. Formulas inside ICC profiles where first introduced during the v4 specification but only apply to single channels. For per channel operations are currently some few formulas supported. However the new approach allows to express with more elementary operations and allows free access to all channels.

Obviously many members have a strong background in printing, which is greatly reflected in the spec. But some companies have a strong relation to various imaging industries, like camera manufacturers, who as well create printing or displaying devices. There is potential, that ICC will support their interests, provided they actively contribute. For instance ICC profile embedding inside images is well covered inside the ICC spec. That was a good base for e.g. the W3C to introduce colour management for photography on the net. There is no equivalent to movie or video content. In parts embedding of ICC profiles there does not even exist.

Altogether, the ICC meeting was a great chance to coordinate and intensify the work of ICC and OpenICC.

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

Posted on January 19, 2012 by oyranos

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.

Firefox-8.0 Colour Management

Posted on December 14, 2011 by oyranos

As I wrote in my recent post, Firefox has many colour management bugs and one is of special concern toward the Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD III. This bug is now reported upstream and I proposed a patch to fix. It is double color correction with X Color Management, which is in close relation to Hal V. Engels report about Firefox color management does not honor _ICC_PROFILE X11 atoms. It affects all X11 builds and inhibits automatic selection of the system ICC monitor profile. A properly detected system monitor profile in Firefox will show default sRGB colours as well as images with ICC profiles much more in line with other colour managed applications. Getting this bug fixed is a major improvement for presenting colours on the web for Linux.

But why is this bug of so strong concern especially for the Oyranos LiveCD? The CompICC desktop colour server, which is part of the CD, uses sRGB as the assumed document colour space of all non colour managed content on screen. It needs to fool all non X Color Management spec aware applications to think the monitor is exactly in sRGB as long as they do not register with the colour server. In the sense of the X Color Management spec only that content, which is registered through specific per window colour regions is honoured to be colour managed and can use the monitors device ICC profile. This way applications like Inkscape, Krita or eog stay upward compatible and continue to work. However Firefox is not able to fetch the sRGB profile due to the above mentioned bug and falls back to a otherwise clever ICC from EDID generated profile. But Firefox colour corrects under Xorg to the from EDID profile and after that already done compensation assumes CompICC the Firefox window to be in sRGB and colour corrects to the actual setup monitor profile, which might be a from EDID generated profile as well, which leads to double colour correction. The fix of this bug lets Firefox detect the correct system profile. Double colour correction can happen as well if the monitor profile is explicitly set in the client application. So use always the system profile. Setting the system profile is really the job of a CMS like Oyranos.

As I read the code, Firefox honors embedded ICC profiles in JPEGs and PNGs. Great. These bitmaps works even in bitmaps inside SVGs, which is wonderful.

In recent changes Firefox can even handle v4 ICC profiles. These profiles are created by newer ICC profilers and became in recent years pretty widespread. But v4 profiles are not supported by default in Firefox. You need to enable them manually in Firefox´ configuration tab.

The situation for pure vectors graphics in Firefox is not in the same level as with bitmaps. The HTML/CSS color_profile element is completely ignored.

Conclusion, Firefox has after the proposed patch the ability to show with its internal colour management comparable colours of bitmaps like most other colour managed applications.

How to deploy the ICC capabilities of Firefox beyond the WWW´s sRGB as a web artist? You can place JPEG and PNG bitmap images with embedded ICC profiles inside web pages. An other way is to place such images inside SVG. While the freely available SVG editor Inkscape will not show a colour corrected preview of these images, it will not touch the JPEG and PNG images, so Firefox can render them correctly by the SVG standard.