Monday, November 30, 2009

Backwards compatibility

Little CMS 2 is almost a full rewrite of 1.x series, so there is no guarantee of backwards compatibility. Having said this, if your application doesn’t make use of advanced features, probably all what you need to do is to change the include file from lcms.h to lcms2.h and maybe to do some minor tweaks on your code. Profile opening and transform creation functions are kept the same, but there are some changes in the flags.  Little CMS 2 does offer more ways to access profiles, so it is certainly possible your code will get simplified.  The basic parts where Little CMS 2 differs from 1.x series are:
  • ·    Transform flags
  • ·    Error handling
  • ·    Textual information retrieval
  • ·    New non-ICC intents
  • ·    Floating point modes
  • ·    Pipelines


On internal advanced functions, the underlying implementation has changed significantly. You still can do all what lcms1 did, but in some cases by using a different approach. There are no longer gamma curves or matrix-shaper functions. Even the LUT functions are gone. All that has been superseded by:
  • ·    Gamma functions -> Tone curves
  • ·    Matrix Shaper, LUT -> Pipelines
  • ·    LUT resampling -> Optimization engine
There is no one-to-one correspondence between old and new functions, but most old functionality can be implemented with new functions.

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