LittleCMS 2.3 released

I am glad to the announce the release 2.3 of the LittleCMS open source color engine.

Version 2.3 is a maintenance release which adresses several minor issues and increases compatibility. It fully implements the recently released ICC 4.3 standard.

See the changelog for further details.
http://www.littlecms.com/download.html

I've uploaded a tarball with lcms2-2.3 release candidate:
http://www.littlecms.com/lcms2-2.3rc2.tar.gz

It is basically a maintenance release, with a number of bugs fixed.
If no issues are found, I plan to release it in a week.

LittleCMS 2.2 released

I am glad to the announce the release 2.2 of the LittleCMS open source color engine.

Version 2.2 adds stability, fixes all know bugs, and adds support for dictionary  metatag. Pascal unit now compiles under FPK Pascal as well as Delphi.

See the changelog for further details.

http://www.littlecms.com/download.html

Updated browser check images

Still, Firefox does not work. But oh, surprise... check IE9!

lcms 2.2 release candidate

I have setup a release candidate for lcms 2.2, which includes support for dictionary metatag and fixes all know issues. I am now removing all copyrighted profiles and  including RTF for the documentation, in order to fulfill Debian requirements.

See here the release candidate:

http://www.littlecms.com/lcms2-2.2rc1.tar.gz

or in the GIT repository, tagged as lcms2-2.2rc

http://github.com/mm2/Little-CMS

Any feedback is very welcome

ICC/HP Digital Print Day

15 June 2011

Co-sponsored by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology

The International Color Consortium, in association with HP Spain, is holding a Digital Print Day at HP's Sant Cugat facility. This will be an opportunity to review and discuss recent work on digital print, focusing primarily on colour management but also encompassing screening, workflow and other related topics.

Papers will be published on-line after the event on the ICC web site http://www.color.org/

Abstracts should be submitted to mailto:pj.green@lcc.arts.ac.ukby April 18 2011. Abstracts will be reviewed by a program committee and notification of acceptance sent by May 11 2011

Papers from students of print and color are especially welcome. ICC will provide a stipend of €100 to all students presenting. A prize of €500 sponsored by HP will be awarded for the best student paper, to be decided by a panel of expert judges.


Happy new 2011!

I would like to begin this year with a comment for a recurrent question:

Can I use LittleCMS to create a profile for my camera/printer/scanner/etc?

Color management, at least ICC color management, is a two step process.

You need both, ICC profiles for each device you want to integrate in the workflow and a piece of software, called "CMM" that uses those profiles for doing color management.

ICC color management requires all "smarts" of gamut mapping to be placed in the profiles. Then actually, building a profile involves a lot of art.

LittleCMS is a CMM. It can use those profiles to perform color management.  It does NOT create profiles. It can be used to create the physical files that contains the color mappings, but it does not compute the maps. I can tell you that creating good profiles is a very difficult task, and takes teams of color scientists to define algoriths and settings, taking into account things like memory colors, skin tones, primary preservation and so.

So, littlecms is useless for you if you need to create profiles from the end user point of view. As useless as it would be photoshop, which cannot create profiles neither, it only uses yet-exiting profiles.

For the programmer point of view, lcms can be used to create the files that contain the colormaps, and many people are using it in such way. That would be, lcms is the canvas artists may use to do their creations. lcms would take care of all details of the profile specification.

Having said that, please take a look on ArgyllCMS, a package that can create v2 profiles. Profiles created by Argyll can be used by LittleCMS without any problem.