[Printing-architecture] Common Printing Dialog and color management

[Chris Murphy]

On Feb 24, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Richard Hughes wrote:

> On 24 February 2011 17:23, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>> We need to assume something, what's it going to be? This is probably sRGB for any desktop inkjet printer...
> 
> This is something I've been struggling with for the last couple of
> days. I think it's sane to assume the default profile to use with
> untagged content or for a missing device profile is going to be sRGB.
> Does this even need to be configurable?

Probably not. But, if it will be assumed to be sRGB, then the CPD "Printer profile" popup menu should be populated with sRGB IECblahblah blah, and not "auto assign" which just makes me want to poke myself in the eye with a stick.

For CMYK printers, well it's another matter because a default CMYK profile for a printing press might cause problems on a CMYK only inkjet or laser printer or copier. Those are rare workflows, usually it's a customer or canned CMYK profile from a manufacturer, or the print driver will accept incoming RGB and convert internally to CMYK in some magic black box manner. But it's possible we need to consider a CMYK path all the way to the printer: it's legitimate to just make that CMYK path a pass through option. In which case it would be great if the CPD knows already what the application is going to be printing with some metadata (hey it's already getting a thumbnail preview, why not the color space of the image?) and the CPD can say "CMYK Passthrough" for the default "Printer profile" option. Not a bad punt for now actually....might be best to just leave CMYK untouched.


> If yes, is it device-specific, user specific or system specific?
> Surely if you're worried about the default fallback colorspace, you
> might as well manually assign the specific output profile to the
> specific device and then you don't care about the fallback anymore.

I'm thinking of users. Not rational beings. The only reason why I'm considering it at all is because I'm inclined to not consider it at all, and that is often a red flag for missing something important. I don't think it is in this case, I think you can just have your last fall back as sRGB for RGB and CMYK pass through for CMYK. For grayscale - well hmmm, it could go either way. Use the sRGB curve, or leave it as it is.


Chris