[Scribus] getting started with colour management

[Hal V. Engel]

On Saturday 27 October 2007 14:21:01 Jan Schrewe wrote:
> Hi,
>
> jrm schrieb am Samstag, 27. Oktober 2007:
> > It seems to be standard advice, when setting up colour management,
> > to set the monitor to high contrast.  When I do this, much of
> > the text on my monitor is fuzzier and harder to read.  Is this
> > normal?  (This is with the X Window System on an older LCD
> > model, an NEC MultiSync LCD 1850E.)
> >
> > Another thing I've never understood is why, with colour management
> > turned off, graphics have been looking quite different in
> > Gimp 2.2 as compared with Scribus 1.3.  For example, I have some
> > TIFF files with a red that shows very bright in Gimp but
> > considerably darker in Scribus.  I'm *guessing* that Gimp and
> > Scribus have been implicitly defaulting to quite different
> > colour profiles, but I don't even know whether that's a sensible
> > way of phrasing it.
>
> Gimp 2.2 does not have colour management. Gimp 2.4 does have a basic colour
> management that produces useable results together with scribus (i.e.
> colours from scribus used in the background of a picture are the same if
> you export the file as pdf X3 - I haven't tested anything else)
>
> > I've got the vague idea that most software assumes the monitor
> > profile would be some flavour of sRGB, with *which* flavour
> > being application dependent.  If I knew what Scribus assumes,
> > then I'd know how to choose a "no-op" monitor profile matching
> > the default assumption.  The colour management stuff has got me
> > pretty confused, so maybe I missed something in the Scribus
> > documentation?
>
> Most software on linux does not have any colourmanagement. AFAIK it's only
> scribus krita and gimp 2.4

And cinepaint,  CUPS, GraphicsMagick, ImageMagick, XSane, Karbon...  CM is 
becoming more mainstream on Linux.  But in general if an application does not 
have the ability to configure how it works with color management then you 
should assume that it is color management dumb and that anything you see is 
in an unknown color space (IE. the colors are likely to be displayed 
incorrectly).  Of course the flip side is that apps that are CM aware need to 
be correctly setup or the colors being displayed may not be any better than a 
CM dumb application.

Also as a side note I have seen references to FireFox 3.0 having color 
management support.

>
> You can see shich profiles scribus uses under File -> Document Properties
> -> Colour management.
>
> Note that the current implementation of X does not support any monitor
> profiles at all. (is that still true?)

Not exactly.  X already has a number of things that were put in place to 
support color management.  Most of this is so new that most apps, window 
managers/DEs and drivers do not yet support these features.  One of these is 
the display profile atom that allows applications to query X to find out what 
profile it should be using for a given display.  Oyranos is an alpha level 
app that will allow users to set this atom.

Unlike Windows and OS/X X.Org currectly does not have a built in gamma loader 
to load the calibration data (VCGT and similar) that many profiles contain.  
But there is a very nice utility named xcalib that works very nicely for 
this.

>
> > Best regards,
> > John (MacPhail)
>
> Best
>
> Jan
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