It has been a long time coming, but the Linux desktop is finally getting to the point where colour management is widely available in applications. At a low level ArgyllCMS is providing support for many colour calibration devices and lCMS provides a nice library for applying colour profile transformations to images. At a high level, the graphics/photos tools DigiKam, GIMP, UFRaw, InkScape, Phatch and XSane are all able to do colour management. Most are even following the X colour management spec to automatically obtain the current monitor profile. In the last few weeks Richard Hughes has filled in another missing piece, writing gnome-colour-manager to provide a UI for driving ArgyllCMS and setting up monitor profiles upon login.
It is great to be able to do photo/graphics work on a fully colour managed Linux desktop….and then you upload the photos to Flickr and they go back to looking awful. After a little googling though, it turns out all is not lost. Firefox does in fact contain some colour management support, hidden away in its truly awful about:config page. If you go to that page and filter on ‘gfx’, you’ll find a couple of settings with ‘color_management’ in their name
gfx.color_management.display_profile
gfx.color_management.mode
gfx.color_management.rendering_intent
The first, display_profile, takes the full path to an ICC profile for your monitor, while mode controls where colour management is applied. A value of ’2′ will make firefox only apply profiles to images explicitly tagged with a profile. A value of ’1′ will make firefox apply profiles to CSS and images, assuming an sRGB profile if the image does is tagged. rendering_intent takes values 0, 1, 2, 3 corresponding to ‘perceptual’, ‘relative colourimetric’, ‘saturation’ and ‘absolute colourimetric’ respectively. I configured my firefox for mode=1, set a profile and restarted. Browsing to Flickr to showed an immediate improvement, with my images actually appearing in the correct colours, matching those I see during editing in GIMP/UFRaw/etc. There’s a little more info about these settings at the mozilla developer notes on ICC.
While it is nice to have colour management in firefox, its implementation is rather sub-optimal since it requires the user to manually configure the display ICC profile path. Each display profile is only valid with the monitor against which it was created. So the moment I switch my laptop from its built-in LCD to an external LCD all the colours in firefox will go to hell. If firefox followed the X ICC profile spec it would be able to automatically apply the correct profiles for each monitor. Hopefully someone will be motivated to fix this soon, since the spec is rather easy to comply with only needing a quick look at a particular named property on the root window.
While browsing around the web a few weeks back I discovered a fabulous new way to waste occupy my time while waiting for code to compile in the form of FlickrVision. A globe showing satellite imagery of the Earth, spinning around every few seconds to show a newly uploaded & geo-tagged photo from Flickr.
For those without flash it also comes in a plain old 2-d format, but that’s not nearly so entertaining.
If you’ve spent any time manipulating / scanning / printing photos you’ll know that getting the colours on screen to match those of the original slide / negative and / or those of the final print is rather non-trivial. Welcome to the special 10th circle of hell that is device colour management. Fortunately there are ways out of this purgatory, in particular for monitors I’m talking about colourimeters; Unfortunately nearly all of these hardware devices require use of Windows or Mac OS-X.
After an extensive Googling session I eventually discovered that a gadget called the Monaco Optix XR is the branded name for the DTP-94 device. This device is in turn the only low cast (ie < $1000) hardware currently supported by Argyll CMS (a set of open source programs for doing colour management including display calibration & profiling).
The bad news is that the company making the Monaco Optix was acquired by x-rite whom (oblivious to this device’s unique selling point for Linux users) have apparantly discontinued its production :-( There’s still various photo stores which have them in stock, so I picked one up from Midwest Photo Exchange. On a more promising note though, I’ve also just read in the Argyll CMS lists that the current development snapshot releases have support for a couple of the Eye-One devices. So perhaps all is not lost of Linux users in the future after all!
Now that I’ve got this device its time to figure out how on earth the Argyll CMS software is actually supposed to be used. There is alot of documentation, but it is far from clear what the best process to go through is. In particular while it can be used with LCDs, the docs are not too good at describing which things need to be done differently for LCDs vs CRTs. Oh well, I’ll figure it out in the end. Getting the monitor setup correctly is also only one of the problems. I still use film for all my photography, scanning it in with a Nikon CoolScan. This needs profiling/calibrating too, so I’ve a set of IT 8.7 scanner calibration targets on order from a cheap source in Germany.
For a couple of years now I’ve been using a Nikon Coolscan V for scanning my 35mm negatives & slides into digital format. While it is not supported by the open source Sane software, the cross-platform VueScan software does a fanatastic job of driving it, even including support for the ICE (infrared) cleaning. VueScan is the first piece of commercial software I’ve bought in years, and I can say it is well worth the $80 for their professional edition which provides lifetime upgrades. If you’ve got a scanner which isn’t supported by Sane, then its worth checking it out.
This was all well and good, but I’ve got and ever increasing number of medium format negatives & slides taken with my Zero Image 2000 pinhole camera which won’t fit in the Nikon. So I went looking for a medium format scanner and finally settled on the Epson Perfection 4490 which was well rated by a number of photographic magazines, and a snip at only $200 – a small fraction the price of the dedicated Nikon film scanner when I bought it back in London.
Getting it working under Linux was a little bit of a roller-coaster ride. I plugged it in, added its USB vendor & product IDs to hotplug usermaps, re-plugged it, and fired up VueScan. “No scanners found”, damn. Checked the device permissions, fine. Tried Sane instead, “No scanners found”. Odd, because various web postings claimed it worked with both Sane & VueScan. Upgraded to the latest version of VueScan, still nothing. I was mildly worried that I had a dud unit now. I re-checked the release notes for VueScan, where-upon I discovered the small print – its only supported if you have the Epson drivers installed, because it needs a firmware loaded. Fortunately it turns out that Epson are a (reasonably) Linux friendly company, providing a Linux version of their scanner software for a large number of distros. The firmware itself is closed source & proprietry, but they do provide both a Linux version of their scanner software (IScan) and a SANE backend, under the GPL (+ an exception to allow them to deal with the firmware loading library). With this all installed, I now have a choice of 3 programs to do scanning with, Sane, IScan, and VueScan.
The only remaining problem is that if I try to scan at the full 4800 DPI my laptop (with 768 MB of RAM) goes into a swap death spiral, because the combination of the raw RGB scan, the infrared scan and the post-processing requires on the order of 1 GB of memory for a single medium format slide. So I’m stuck at 2400 DPI for while, until I talk myself into shelling out for a new desktop with 4 GB of RAM. That said, this is more than adequate for now – the image below is a scan of one of my first pinhole images from a year & a half ago in London, scaled down from 5000×5000 pixels.
One negative done, 195 to go…I may be some time…
So while I’ve got an existing gallery site for putting up my general pictures / snaps, I felt I needed something a bit more styled & professional looking for my serious photographs. So with a few hours work I put together an initial photo site