El 16/06/13 09:09, Vladimir Savic escribió:
Hi Martin, Sorry for very late reply.
There is no need for mock-up really. Read this lines if you've never tried assigning an ICC profile to a document: "...First at least one CMYK profile needs to be added to the document being worked on. That can be accessed in the GUI through the "Color Management" tab on the document properties dialog. Once at least one profile has been added, the color pickers in the Fill & Stroke dialog can be used to pick colors in that colorspace via specifying the ICC profile." [1] What annoys me is that even if you have only one ICC profile attached to a doc, you still need to manually select it from a drop-down combo of CMS tab (Fill&Straoke dialog). Can Inkscape automatically pick it for me?
Regards, Vlada
I always wondered the reason of that tab. I mean, I can understand that every object in the SVG document may have different color profiles and that that dialog allows to choose whatever profile you want for the selected object. The question, however, is if that case of several profiles in the same document is so frequent to justify that awkward default worflow for managed color. I think it's more realistic to think that a user would select one profile for RGB and other for CMYK, and if she does it, it will be probably because she wants every RGB and CMYK objects in the document in that colorspace. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that nobody will need other profiles in the document, but I'm convinced that's a less frequent case, and a rare or edge case shouldn't make the experience of frequent tasks more difficult or cumbersome. Right now we have basically a "color-unmanaged" workflow and a tool for managing color in a per-object basis. I'd love to hear if a single user ever used that feature for a complex drawing with hundreds of colors and objects. Also, the CMS tab seems to work for CMYK but not for RGB but it allows to pick an RGB profile anyway.
IMO, this can be improved unifying the sliders and getting rid of the CMS tab. If somebody chose a CMYK profile and attached it to the document, it clarly means that CMYK values are relevant and a raw representation in CMYK of RGB values isn't desirable anymore, so I think it would be pretty reasonable to assume that if there is a single CMYK profile set in the document, user will expect color managed CMYK when she uses it. Regarding RGB, if there is no RGB profile set, generally sRGB is assumed. Again, if a user choses a different RGB profile, is it to expect that she wants that RGB profile for the elements in the document, same case. And what if user choses more than one profile? Then a multiple selector can be used (pretty much like the current CMS tab). Multiple profiles would require just an extra setting in the profile embedding dialog for selecting what profile is the default or fallback profile. In that case every color would be color-managed once a profile is selected, and only if another RGB or CMYK profile is added the selector would appear in the RGB and CMYK sliders. (maybe an "unmanaged" option could be added too).
I think this would work, but there's a remaining issue: unmanaged RGB and CMYK sliders are linked (I mean, they are representations of the same color in different models), but that's not possible with managed colors. That's technically solvable just with warnings in the dialogs. For instance, if user chose an RGB combination that falls beyond the current CMYK profile's gamut, a big fat label could warn the user that the current color is out-of-gamut, allowing him to tweak the CMYK sliders, which would automatically clip the RGB color to the closest CMYK combination using the default rendering intent set in the preferences as soon as he clicks on one of the sliders. That also can be fixed by adding optional RGB clamping, so the RGB sliders can't go beyond the printable gamut.
I think it can be done, and that would simplify the color managed workflow in inkscape a lot. If done properly, the unified dialogs could be extended to allow also unmanaged values and different profiles, but that should be, IMO, a second level option and not the primary workflow. I'm convinced that most of the users choose a single colorspace (or two, an RGB and a CMYK tops) for their everyday color-managed work.
I'd love to know what you guys think about this. Maybe I missed something, but if you think it's a viable idea I would gladly turn this idea into a detailed blueprint. It looks like a good GSoC project for the future :-)
Gez.