Jan-Peter brings up a good point. One would think we could do better
and offer more in 2005 than what was offered in 1992 in a single
application. Adobe has made it clear they are deferring color
management to a frame work that isn't entirely their own - ICC. The
profiles they include are insufficient for professional use because
various levels of black generation aren't provided and there is no
way to edit the profiles including no ability to change black
generation.
So I suggest two things. One for advanced users, and one for basic
users that will benefit advanced users as well.
1. A tool that would allow profiles to be built with a minimum of
measurements, similar to Adobe's Custom CMYK dialog which hasn't been
improved since jumping completely on the ICC bandwagon. That is, the
tool would accept either manual input XYZ or LAB values for
primaries, overprints, and some tints; or it could accept a plain
text file containing measurement data in a self-describing format; or
it could accept an ICC profile an intelligently extract measurement
data from the private tags if the vendor has included that
information in the profile, and if not to extract "measurement" data
using AbsCol.
2. Come up with a container mechanism to eliminate the clutter that
the ICC profile format mandates. If you have a single device, with
three media, two lighting conditions, and three levels of black
generation, you have to build 18 profiles for that single device.
That's pretty crazy, but it could be mitigated through a container
mechanism. Either a real container would be a way to package all
profiles for a device into a single profile, or into a folder which
gets a particular filename extension making it act like a package
does on OS X for example. Or a virtual container where metadata is
inserted into each profile denoting the "family" it belongs to, or
using an external database to store these associations. That way a
user could simply select the device they want to print to and the
application/printing subsystem figure out automatically what profiles
to use based on media type selection, and per object settings such as
amount of GCR to use, rather than directly selecting profiles from a
list.
We should treat ICC profiles as metadata, not as actual data that the
end user needs to interact with so literally.
Chris Murphy
Color Remedies (TM)
www.colorremedies.com/realworldcolor
-------------------------------------------------------------
Co-author "Real World Color Management, 2nd Edition"
Published by PeachPit Press (ISBN 0-321-26722-2)
-------------------------------------------------------
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