I would like to get back to the original question that started this thread. What CM workflows are currently being used in Linux? What tools are used and where? How are they integrated to bring automation to the workflow?
I'm doing colour on Linux with a mix of LCMS and my own software. I'm not really using any input ot output calibration though, except for my own hardware, so I'm not sure how relevant it is.
In case anyone is interested, the project is a posters-on-demand system at the National Gallery in London.
- A large format studio digital camera scans each painting, the camera produces absolute colorimetric D65 CIELAB images to about 2 - 3 dE average error on a Macbeth chart (we did most of the camera software)
- We have our own image processing library, VIPS, which we use for manipulating the images, http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk
- VIPS has its own monitor calibration system based on some measurements I made with a TV analyser and a paper someone at Barco wrote 10 years ago ... it really ought to use LCMS
- The images are transformed to D50 relative colorimetry, rotated, resized and cropped and sharpened
- There is also an amount of 'cosmetic' colour manipulation to account for ink metamerism, surface finish of the media and most people's preference for slightly brighter-than-real reproductions
- VIPS uses LCMS to output sRGB JPEGs
- We use pdflatex to typeset the JPEGs as PDF posters (adding a caption pulled from a database, setting the page size, etc)
- The kiosk in the shop holds about 8000 PDFs which are sent directly to a HP5500 inkjet to produce posters for customers (driverless printing) on productivity semi-gloss paper and UV inks
- End-to-end colour accuracy (the difference between original painting and print) is about 4 - 5 dE average (discounting the cosmetic colour changes mentioned above)
- We are using the built-in printer profiles ... I experimented with ProfileMaker Pro 4 on a Mac but I couldn't get significantly better results than the pre-canned ones (a few years ago the built-in profiles were not so great, they seem fine now though)
- The whole pipeline is automated with Perl scripts: it takes about a week of processing to generate all the PDFs
- We proofed three or four paintings to tune the system, the rest we left to the maths to sort out
- They mostly look great. Ink metamerism is the most significant remaining print quality problem IMO
John
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