[Scribus] colour management in scribus

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday 01 November 2006 14:32, Terence Chan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm new to scribus and I'm trying to put together a book of photography
> using scribus. I import all my images as tiff. I've installed all the
> lcms and lprof stuff and have looked through the documentation on the
> scribus web site. I also have quite a lot of experience with printing
> images I've processed with GIMP. What I know is I have my monitor
> calibrated more or less right as my images appear in print the same as
> they appear in GIMP. What I've noticed is that my images appear quite
> different from GIMP once they've been imported into scribus; worse still
> they appear quite different again once I export to PDF (e.g. the B&W
> images appear a lot darker and show less detail). I assume this
> is a colour management problem? If anyone out there has any helpful
> hints about how to fix this, or can point me to the right documentation,
> I'd be very grateful. Sorry if this is already answered in some
> documentation somewhere, but as I say, I'm new to all this and haven't
> found the right answers on the web.
>
> Thanks in advance for any help,
> Terence

Getting color management properly set up is not something that is trivial.  In 
addition the details will vary considerably depending on your OS and the 
tools you use.  Having said that the first thing you need to do is to get an 
understanding of how color management really works.  I would suggest that you 
visit http://www.normankoren.com/color_management.html .  This web site has 
both introductory and advanced information about color management.  It is 
somewhat Windows centric so Linux and Mac users will sometimes have to read 
between the lines.  But the information is well presented and accessible. 

If you are running Linux there are somethings that you as a user must do that 
are handled by the OS in Windows and (more so) on the Mac.  This means that 
some steps in the work flow must be done manually and that you have to have a 
better understanding of color management to get things to work correctly than 
does a Windows or Mac user.

Also just because your monitor and your output printed from GIMP appear the 
same is not a particularly good indication that your monitor is well 
calibrated.  It is probably more likely that you are getting equally bad 
results from both that just happen to be close to the same.  The only way to 
know for sure how well calibrated your monitor is would be to use some type 
of color meter or photospectrometer to measure and calibrate your monitors 
actual output.  But the proper use of visual techniques will get you close 
enough if your needs are not too color critical. 

My main point is that the first step is to start reading/learning about color 
management.  If you are brand new to the subject area it will likely take you 
a few weeks or perhaps months to really understand how this works well enough 
that you can actually implement a good color managed work flow.

Hal