Magic Lantern @ LGM in Leipzig

… on Wednesday April 2nd. Their talk will begin 18:30 o’clock local time in the New Paulinum of the University of Leipzig.

Magic Lantern was started in 2009 by Trammel Hudson to bring professional video recording and advanced photographic features to Canon EOS DSLR cameras.

The project expanded and its feature set. Custom video overlays, raw video recording, time lapsed video, manual audio control and more belong to it. With these tools Magic Lantern greatly improved useability in many areas upon bare Canon firmware and is now daily used by many professional photographers, journalists and movie makers.

Linux Color Management Hackfest Brno 2012 ended

Around a dozen people met inside the Red Hat offices in Brno last weekend. The attendees came from various distributions and projects to discuss and work on color management for Linux. Most people arrived at Thursday and we started immediately to brain storm ideas and share information.

I was quite shocked as I heard Dantii could not join us. Fortunately the last messages about him sound very encouraging. It is great that our community could in different ways help him and his family.

The basic concept we worked with during the hackfest, was the opt-out of colour management approach. That was visible in printing and in window manager colour management.

Printing people discussed the PDF/X OutputIntent. The concept was developed to overcome the current short commings in the cupsICCprofile, which is primarily a vendor solution for CUPS print servers and the colord user session hook inside CUPS server. The implementation of the concept was done inside libCmpx, which is basically a wrapper around Ghostscript, which does the majority of the work, and a interface to Oyranos. From the other side John Layt looked into that work and Krita new print colour management tab to understand the implications for the KDE/Qt print dialog. He discussed lively with Till Kamppeter, Richard Hughes, Chris Murphy and me on how to get forward with that. Richard wrote a proof of concept for on screen print simulation in GTK. Chris talked a lot about osX printing and did some testing there. His experience on other platforms than Linux helped us a lot to figure out, which path we want to go and way the make sense. I searched for some PDF’s showing the features we need. They can now be found on ColourWiki. Jaroslav Reznik printed them and Till tested them. Michael Vrhel from the Ghostscript project fixed already after the event all of the bugs, which Till worked on in Brno. We had the idea, that some PDF printers might be able to do the right thing with the OutputIntent themselves. While discussing on how to know about that capability, Till and Richard had a nice idea how to reduce code duplication inside the current set of Linux CUPS filters. In parts the Color Management Hackfest crossed over into a Printing Summit.

Jan Grulich started coding on KolorManager. He implemented a widget to show a 2D graph of a ICC profile inside the information tab. Sirko Kemter was not very happy about the colours inside the graph. So I adjusted them, but after the hackfest.

While working on that, Jan profiled his monitor using Dantii’s colord-kde. Yes, Lukáš Tinkl fixed it, so it can now create ICC profiles. We needed to hand massage the profile to get it into Taxi DB, and then thought, it would be good to download the fresh profile later through Oyranos. That worked fine on the command line. But inside KolorManager a selection that a profile is available for download from Taxi DB would be more appealing. Jan wanted to look into that, and I worked later on a API and code snippet for Oyranos.

By the way, the above screen shot is done using the new colour correction feature for KDE-4.10. You might see the strong colour cast in it. Dan Vrátil worked on undoing that cast inside KSnapshot using the actual monitor profile. The initial coding was fast. But he likes to get that working for multiple outputs too.

Casian Andrei, who did the KWin Color Correction project during this years GSoC, wrote some documentation about that newly added feature. While writing that and clarifying some points, we discussed the opt-out inside KWin and found that it is not yet present. Sig. But Casian had played with the idea already and said that per region opt-out would be trivial inside KWin and started to write on that feature during Sunday. In case that works out, it would be trivial to opt out inside existing applications. But we found as well, that for a perfect results only a blending in the correct colour space is needed during compositing. That can be implemented inside toolkits, which is not trivial, and can then be used together with the per window opt-out. That buys us some valuable time for the toolkits to become ready for full colour management support. Whether the same per region approach is easy enough to implement in Wayland needs to be seen.

Now back to profile distribution. Oyranos obtained a new backup tool for Taxi DB. And we counted already over 200 different ICC profiles in the online data base. Sirko Kemter and Daniel Jahre grabbed the taxi sources, installed MongoDB and worked on mostly basic stuff to add later more features. The online front end to the DB can be used on every platform for download and upload. Daniel and Sirko discussed how to temporarily store a ICC profile from the ColorHug LiveCD. We found that the data base can be used for very different things, e.g. distribution of spectral data sets for camera sensors.

Pippin worked since some time on improving the display of gradients on 8-bit driven monitors. He came up with a dithering approach and tested that using the Taxi DB profiles for the analysis of his implementation. That helped him to make the algorithm more robust even with strongly distorted monitor gamma curves. There is quite some interest inside the graphics designers community for his work to solve banding problems. We talked a bit about gegl and I found babl especially interesting. The small library does, what I call pixel layout conversions. Those are in part colour space conversions and encoding conversions. For better separating encoding, 8-bit versus 16-bit etc., from colour spaces, e.g. linear gamma + Rec709 primaries versus sRGB etc., we need better ICC profile analysis. Especially gamma analysis can be improved inside rendering pipelines. Beside discussing hardware stuff, spectral imaging, video processing and so on, he gave a small and very helpful introduction into colour theory, which was a eye opener for many of the colour management newcomers and thus very welcome.

We had a interesting discussion about financial implications of colour measurement hardware. My impression is the high costs and thus reduced availability for good colour measurement gear nags on the success and acceptance of ICC colour management in consumer and professional markets.

During the hackfest it was really a pleasure to have so many experts in the field in one room and work together in a highly productive atmosphere. Some of them I met the first time. So let me thank our sponsors Google, Red Hat and KDE for their generous support of the hackfest idea.

We all worked quite a lot and found such a event should not stay single. So we agreed already to arrange a one day track and one following day at LGM in Madrid / Spain 2013 under the OpenICC umbrella. I hope we will see then even more projects coming.

LibreGraphicsMeeting Videos

In begin of May there was the 7th LibreGraphicsMeeting in Vienna and Oyranos participated also this year in this meeting of nearly all free/open source graphic software. Oyranos had two talks there and I already blogged the impressions. Now the most of the videos from the talks are online.

The playlist with all talks which was recorded can be found here.

Linux Color Management Hackfest idea

Sirko brought up the idea to organise a hackfest together with developers of applications for Linux desktops and experts interested in colour management. The idea behind that event was to bring interested developers together, support them in implementing color management in their software and move forward that topic across desktops and distributions.

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.

LGM 2012 Impressions

The Technikum Wien provided a nice place and great support for the LibreGraphicsMeeting. Many thanks to them. LGM happened together with the Linuxwochen Wien and developers and users could talk about graphics and arts themes. Additionally to the one presentation track over all days, we had BoF’s and workshops. Some of us took the chance to present to a non LGM audience and meet people there too.

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 with Elektra on LGM 2012 Vienna

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.

Talks: Libre Graphics Meeting 2012

As it was mentioned in a blogpost before, Oyranos will participate in the 7th edition of Libre Graphics Meeting, which is held in Vienna from 2nd until 5th of May at UAS Technikum Vienna. The schedule is published since a few days and so I can tell that the talks I submitted are accepted.

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.

LGM 2012 talks

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.

OyranosColour 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.

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
Click here to lend your support to: Libre Graphics Meeting Presentation and make a donation at www.pledgie.com ! Click here to lend your support to: Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 Vienna and make a donation at www.pledgie.com ! Click here to lend your support to: Tatica travels to LGM and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

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.

LGM Vienna 2-5 May 2012

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:

OpenICC and basICColor profile packages

Originally I wanted to have most packages ready for Montreal. But it was good to not announce them. Now they are slowly rolling out.

Today came the basICColor_Offset_2009 package 1.1.1 shortly after OpenICC Data package 1.2.0. Both form now a fairly distributable and stable usable set of ICC profiles with completely free licenses.

ICC Examin had some issues in the CinePaint plugin. So I decided to first fix that  and as well finish the started ICC v4 support in ICC Examin. Most of that should work already in git.

LGM Conference 2011 Montreal

LGM was a quite useful chance to meet people. Jon Cruz from Inkscape I met the first time, which was a nice experience. His remarks on the Cairo API for ICC support at the end of the OpenICC round table where interesting and I hope we can continue with that hot toppic. As well I meet Richard Hughes the author of colord and GCM. We could settle on a specification for file based colour device configuration exchange of CMS/CMF’s and discuss desktop colour servers, which was quite interesting. My talk was about “Connecting Device Calibration to ICC Profiles“.

With many more people I could exchange ideas and make plans. Among them where Oliver Berten, the author of SwatchBooker,  Peter Linell and Jean Ghali from Scribus and many more. To my surprise Boudewijn Rempt from Krita pointed out that OpenGTL‘s shiva can handle more than three colour channels. I would love to get support for that in Oyranos.

The whole atmosphere at LGM was great and Louis and the LGM organisation team did great in preparing culinary and cultural program highlights additional to a wonderful conference. As time for coding was somewhat short, some slight improvement could be coding & buffet. This would be a nice experience instead of the well known coding and pizza.

I found the town of Montreal to be a surprisingly friendly place. People from so many cultural background where smiling in the streets, of course always with a arm’s length distance, which is quite unusual in Europe.