During the recent LGM we found a chance to involve Richard Hughes and planed together about what we like to do during the hackfest. We spotted three main areas of interest: desktop applications including window managers, web browsers and printing. These topics are already worked on, but in a scattered way.

As example, Gwenview is a really great application for managing pictures. But it has no color management implemented yet. Color management in KWin is worked on during the GSoC this year, but in the opposite color management in the compositing manager mutter on the GNOME side is far away as can be read here. Not many web browsers support color management and if they who do, it is often incomplete. The SVG v2 standard will for example introduce additional color management features compared to SVG v1. So it is now the right time to get these implemented in order to be well prepared. For the KDE printing stack there is also a GSoC project this year, but also the Linux Foundation has a working group for this topic.

So, by meeting in person in one place, we want to get something done and build a good understanding of the role of each participating group for a working end to end colour management.

The hackfest will very likely happen in Brno in the Czech Republic at the Red Hat offices. A good time appears later this year 16th till 19th November. Now we like to collect more ideas, speak to people and sort financial issues.

The LGM talks covered lots of OpenCL projects. That means modern GPU computing power is available to open source graphics components in a much broader way. As the use of OpenCL is supported by the Mesa software implementation, there is some kind of guarantee, that OpenCL programs will run on elder hardware. That means OpenCL can be used without the need for developers to provide a fallback mechanism, which simplifies adoption.

The colour management talks provided lively discussions around many topics like printing, displaying and open hardware. We discussed as well the impact of introducing colour management in frameworks like GEGL. As mizmo showed interest, I explained the most basic terms of ICC rendering intents in a small BoF using ICC Examin. Animtim compiled and installed Oyranos from sources and wrote already a small tutorial on how to build Oyranos on kubuntu-12.04.

Markus Raab presenting Elektra on LGM 2012 Vienna

The presentation of Markus Raab about the Elektra configuration gave to me some impressive insights into the concepts and flexibility of that small framework. The really cool thing about this library is it can abstract a lot of details and provide additional features, which can be added on run time like DBus support. He announced a new release of Elektra as version 0.8.0 during the event.

The metalab was for most people from countries without a similar open hardware/open source collaboration zone a impressive visit. We all enjoyed to could stay there for some hours and felt, this place is much in the spirit of most LGM contributors.

Nathan Willis @ LGM 2012 Vienna

During Nathan Willis workshop about the Create wiki, we discussed to start a email list for create users. That list is supposed to provide help and talk about experiences with graphics applications and help from users for users.

Sirko (alias gnokii) and Tobias (alias houz) played diplomat and managed to channel information in a way that Richard Hughes and I could finally meet in a productive atmosphere and continued talking about technical issues. At the end we found a mod to work again together on standards inside the OpenICC collaboration project. I am pretty happy with that change. So, thanks to all parties who helped with that.

Café Hawelka Vienna

Tatica, Pete, Sirko and I walked around on the last day in Vienna and relaxed in the café above.

• ccxxmake can create correction matrixes using a reference colorimeter
• support JPEG in cctiff, tiffgamut and extracticc
• support display calibration and profiling on display without VideoLUT
• support directing colour patches to a web browser for measurements and profiling

The ChangeLog contains the full list of modifications.

About: ArgyllCMS is the primary tool set in the open source world to access colour measurement devices and to create ICC profiles. Together with it’s colour conversion and analysis capabilities it is located in the tool box of many colour management professionals. Several freely distributed graphical front ends exist for ease of handling.

Here are in short the projects:

Joseph Simon will continue to work on PDF colour management for the
KDE/Linux printing stack. To have a real world project he choose to implement
Colour Management for Krita Printing.

Casian Andrej will work on ICC KWin colour correction using the X Color
Management spec. That way KWin gets a clear path toward consistent colour
output on the desktop.

Nitin Chada will work on different toolkit dependent renderers for a
XForms subset inside the Simple Toolkit Abstraction project. That standalone project shall enable modules to present
options inside dialogs or embedded in host applications.

Lets have a successful coding summer and deserve the trust Google putted in
the OpenICC organisation and with that in the participating students.

Most of the talks about color management topics will be held on the first day. The first talk of this day will be held from Richard Hughes and introduces the ColorHug. Then my first talk “Evolving Concepts for Colour Management” will follow. Chris Lilley from W3C will inform after my talk about the status of color managment in SVG2. Then the “competiting” color managment will present there developments since the last LGM, Oyranos will start with “Colour Management a la Greek” followed by Richard Hughes “colord – Linux Color Management Framework, One Year On“. Last talk of the color management talks will be “Taxi DB – Call A Cab To Bring The Colors” which will be delivered from Sirko.
The rest of the talks of the first day are mostly topics like: “Re-lab project. Formats reverse engineering: tools and results” or “Import filters for vector graphic formats in LibreOffice: the reverse- and straight engineering fun“.
The rest of the week will be filled with a lot of talks, workshops and project meetings/hacking sessions. I will also give an workshop about Hughins eye on thursday 1pm.

Many great people already announced their presence and probably many other will come too. If you are into Free software and doing anything graphic related, this is the place where you should go. And the best thing is, Linuxwochen Vienna will be held at the same time and place, so there will not be only talks and workshops about graphic topics.

But the Libre Graphics Meeting needs still some support raising the money for the travel costs for speakers, there is a  pledgie where you can donate.

The PDF Technical Conference was organised by the independent PDFassociation and held this week March 27-28, 2012 in Basel, Switzerland in the rooms of Adobe. PDF experts from around the world meet there to talk about hot new stuff and to discuss technical details in a friendly atmosphere. In the following text I will highlight some of the talks.

Andreas Kraushaar from Fogra gave a talk about spectral imaging and why it is a good thing to support that inside PDF spot colours for packaging. Most of the time the number and kind of inks used for packaging is rapidly changing. So colour profiling the ICC way means a waste of too many time and material as it is not flexible enough for that. Embedded spectral data based recipes for rendering spot colours in supporting applications can improve speed and handling considerably.

Two talks elaborated on transparency in PDF. I found it amusing that the concept of a blending colour space is as well in the PDF community still a hot topic. But of course rendering to offscreen bitmaps instead of traditionally one final output buffer is quite different and developers agreed to find implementation sometimes not easy. And yes, there are many PDF viewers around, which blend Cmyk and RgbA together in one go ignoring any blending space requirement.

Florian Süßl from zipcon presented the well known ECI Altona Test Suite 2 now covering PDF/X-4 including transparencies. He elaborated on the work involved on how to create all the tests following the PDF-1.7 spec. He gave some examples where the various PDF renderers failed certain test. This is again a very valuable tool for developers of PDF software. It would be cool if such a test suite becomes part of the specification itself as is usual with other standards to help verifying implementations.

Following the topic of quality testing, David van Driessche explained the GWG test suite. I would find it really cool to embed GWG tests into a dedicated PDF document page for checking reproduction capabilities by layout applications like Scribus. That feature would be helpful for critical viewing and to easily test proofing software.

Bill McCoy from idpf presented a comparison of PDF and the HTML5/ePUB publication format. The later one is based on W3C standards like SVG and TTS with few modifications and has together with these a great potential depending on the involved people and organisations to further develop these technologies. ePUB was created to provide a independent platform for electronic publishers. And as the ePUB format comes out of open source technologies, it can as well be supported in the open source world by e.g. Mozilla and
.

The conference was beside sometimes very full rooms a well organised and interesting event.

There is already much written about Google Summer of Code. I just want to point you to a bunch of cool colour management (CM) project ideas.

OpenICC lists some ideas, which are interesting for cross desktop CM, especially for start in bringing CM to toolkits. Interested students are basically free to select one toolkit, which fits them most.

The CMM’s for Oyranos idea shall ease access to the upcoming spectral imaging capabilities inside the ICC architecture and to use smart CMM’s like ArgyllCMS was demoed doing stand alone and within ColorSync. Smart CMMs allow to optimise colour conversions for a images and devices, which will show up in more lively photographs.

The OpenGTL/OpenCL meta backend for the Oyranos CMM framework will enable us to write CMM’s, which run on the GPU instead of the CPU. That would potentially bring a big speed improvement for deploying applications through a simple CMS API.

One student proposed to work on characterisation based ICC colour correction inside KWin, which will fly over any of the old style per single channel gamma calibration. If you like to get ride of each monitor showing you a different saturated red, green or blue desktop background, then go ahead and propose a similar project for one of your favorite compositing window managers to the openSUSE or OpenICC orgs.

And of course there are printing related CM project ideas. One for CM printing with Krita and one project for general CM print queue setup in KolorManager.

The new minor release of the icc-profiles-openicc package contains a newly created ProPhoto-RGB.icc profile. It was peer reviewed by the OpenICC group. The profile is intended for use in cameraRAW applications like digikam. ProPhoto-RGB covers the very wide colour gamut of modern photo sensors. One difference to existing profile versions of the colour space is it’s liberal licensing.

OpenICC is a group of colour management and imaging experts and several open source and proprietary projects on freedesktop.org .

ArgyllCMS author Graeme Gill released a new version of his cross platform colour management solution.The new version provides support for new devices, improvements and bug fixes.

• new Spyder 4 display colorimeter supported (Note that the user must supply calibration data)
• new experimental support for ColorHug display colorimeter (read instruction how to enable)
• add -y option for extended display selection and tweak integration times

The later feature hints, that some newer instruments speed up with measurement times and need now more careful adjustments in order to not interfere with display frequencies.

About: ArgyllCMS is the primary tool set in the open source world to access colour measurement devices and to create ICC profiles. Together with it’s colour conversion and analysis capabilities it is located in the tool box of many colour management professionals. Several freely distributed graphical front ends exist for ease of handling.

On the Oyranos project booth discussed old friends various colour management topics and concepts. We felt that colour management terms and concepts inside the open source community are behind the awareness of other comparable graphic techniques like for instance font rendering. The more I find it amazing, that there is a core of users, which try hard to understand ICC techniques.

One topic with neighboring openSUSE people was of course the strong rose awareness around colour management during the recent discussions on the KDE core-devel list. What I found encouraging is, many people inside the KDE community see it important to collaborate. And so I think we in the OpenICC community should accelerate on our formal recommendation efforts for sharing colour data and configurations. An other related point was made, that it would be not helpful to stall projects in a too long wait for constructive discussions to come to live. I tried this sometimes and see now that balance between discussion and start for actual work could be improved. Good to get so many feedback about OpenICC core stuff in great face to face discussions.

With openSUSE’es Tom I discussed his improvements on the new open build service (OBS) search page layout, which is a great ongoing work. But much to my surprise he could point me to a nice and long wanted OBS feature, which I now integrated into the Oyranos download pages. That is, OBS provides embeddable download instructions for each distribution package of a project. These easy instructions show end users, how to install the desired software including all dependencies from OBS. Thanks for this valuable hint, which makes our colour management packages in OBS much more accessible to our users.

Looking around I found the mageia distribution interesting and would find it great to see this distribution integrated into OBS once a successful version 2 comes out this spring. But of course there are other interesting distributions out there to integrate into OBS. One advantage of OBS for me as a maintainer is as well, that I can test my packages prior to release in one go.

On the FFmpeg booth we discussed the idea that 3D lookup textures are a very simple way of exchanging colour transforms. I will surely look deeper into this and want to find a useful format to exchange 3D shader data for OpenGL textures. In CompICC a 16-bit PPM image helped for debugging. Lets see if we can find a more common and useful format to reuse.

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.

Changes Overview:

• new support per region ICC profiles
• new switch to X Color Management specification
• require libXcm-0.5.0 and Oyranos-0.4.0

Changes from 0.8.4:

• fix alpha blending
• speed up load time (cache the transformed pixels in memory)

About:
The project brings you instant desktop colour correction on GPU through the compiz window manager (0.7.x/0.8.x). It supports multi monitors and live connecting. The implicite colour conversion appears on the fly. To opt out of colour correction for specialised graphics applications the X Color Management spec 0.4 is supported. Devices can be configured through the Oyranos Colour Management System.

ChangeLog:
http://compicc.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=compicc/compicc;a=shortlog;h=refs/tags/0.8.5

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.

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.

Changes Overview:

• switch from net-color to X Color Management specification 0.4
• support per region ICC profile
• add API to parse capabilities from _ICC_COLOR_DESKTOP atom
• use autotools
• add XcmVersion.h file
• build under osX and Win32 without X11 and Linux specific parts

About:
The library communicates X colour regions between server and clients, which is described in the included X Color Management spec. EDID data can be fetched through i2c communication. EDID data can be parsed for identification and access to colorimetric
calibration data. libXcm helps in observing known X11 colour management events.

Known applications using libXcm:
The library is used by CompIcc a compiz plugin for full screen colour correction in hardware. libXcm allows the plugin to support multi monitor and multiple regions per window. The Oyranos Colour Management System uses the EDID parser. qcmsevents applet observes and displays colour management events in a nice GUI. Xcm contains three command line tools for EDID fetching, EDID parsing and event observing.

ChangeLog:
http://www.oyranos.org/scm?p=xcolor.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/tags/libXcm-0.5.0

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Anyway, the little tablet is now running the XChat IRC client. And I am totally happy with it, as it serves it’s main purpose now as a well featured and productive communication client, which was not possible with Android alone. A patched tightVNCserver with Hacker’s Keyboard serves me well as interface to a chrooted Linux. Again I can enjoy side by side windows on a Linux desktop. The 10” device at the resolution of a desktop monitor provides enough space for that. A light wight and working web browser is Midori. For email I switch currently to K-9 Mail on Android. PDF and office documents are good readable in Android. gcc, gitk, terminal and so on work as expected. Oyranos builds fine.

It is nice to have practical two OSes on one device and use the advantages of both.

Update [March 22, 2012]: here is a ICC profile of the Lenovo Thinkpad Tablet inbuild monitor.

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: