I have been seriously considering moving to Linux but find myself stymied by the primitive state of color management support. Both at the system level and in the image acquisition, editing and printing tools.
I have a good color management workflow on Windows and once properly setup it is mostly automatic. Even with all of this built in support for color management it is still a very large task to get this set up. Getting good device profiles being the hardest part - particularly printers. The only semi-manual step in my Windows CM workflow is selecting the correct printer profile in Photoshop before sending the image to the print driver. Since I almost always use the same printer setup and paper this setting will default to the correct profile most of the time. I am using profiling tools other than LCMS (Profile Prism). I would like to understand the CM workflow for Linux with the tools currently available. I have seen some information on creating and checking profiles but nothing on an over all workflow. For example, how do I get the Xserver to use my monitor profiles? In Windows I set this up with Adobe Gamma. Where and how do I convert the image to my printer color space? In Windows this is part of the Photoshop print with preview dialog. Where and how do I setup my scanner drivers to imbed the scanner profile? In Windows my scanner software (VueScan and SilverFast) do this automatically once it is setup in the software with a simple GUI dialog. How do I setup a working color space in The GIMP? Again in Phototshop I simply go to the preferences dialog and select my working color space profile. An example of my frustration. When using The GIMP I can apply a ICC profile preview to the image much like in Photoshop. Presumably to see what the image will look like when printed. But if Xserver is not using my custom monitor profile then this "preview" is meaningless. In addition, The GIMP, other than the preview filter, knows nothing about color management. This means, at the very least, that an effective color management workflow is much more complex since color management operations must all be manually handled outside of the image editing application. So there must be preprocessing steps to embed the input device profile in the image (since Xsane does not handle this - VueScan will do this if your device is supported), then convert the image to the display color space and then post processing steps to convert to the printer color space before printing. How are you handling these in your workflow? Have you automated any of these steps? Is there a document somewhere that covers this? -- Hal V. Engel
pgptbZ0akosun.pgp
Description: signature
