The p-Code Machine

Richard Hughes has recently been rocking my world in a very big way… Color management on Linux/GNOME has been too hard for much too long and GNOME Color Manager is about to fix that. The hardcore groundwork of reading colorimeters and color calculus had already been taken care of by Graeme Gill with ArgyllCMS. GNOME Color Manager built on that by providing users with a very easy going GNOME user interface, while in the background driving ArgyllCMS to do all the hard work.

Another “problem” of using the commandline utilities of ArgyllCMS was, that display profiles consist of two parts. A VideoLUT which has to be applied by X11 or loaded into the video card, and a color matrix with gamma shaper which has to be applied by the color management aware applications like GIMP and UFRaw.

In the past, I’ve always built simpeler (and less accurate) profiles, to prevent me from having to load the VideoLUT every time I logged in. GNOME Color Manager solves this by introducing a service which does this fully automatically. Making it easy to use more accurate profiles.

Last but not least, GNOME Color manager also adheres to the XICC specification, and makes sure color management aware applications like GIMP and UFRaw can automatically see for which profile the VideoLUT had been applied, and thus dictating which profile to load in the application.

As could be expected, I’ve been building Ubuntu (Karmic) packages from regular git checkouts, which are available at my PPA.