Unbounded CMM

With the drop I'm posting right now (September 19) most of the utilities are now working. You have a tifficc applier, a transicc calculator and a linkicc devicelink generator. As you can see, some names have changed. This is because icclink was clashing with Graeme Gill's icclink from Argyll. This latter is an outstanding utility, and many users may want to have both installed, so I changed the name and get an extra consistency bonus (now all lcms utility names are "whatever-icc")
Now you have transicc (former icctrans) and therefore you can check one of the new features of lcms2. That's what is called "unbounded CMM mode"

What is that? Well, with lcms2 you can use floating point values. That means,  you are no longer limited to 0..255 on 8 bits or 0...65535 on 16 bits, but on some profiles you can get out of those bounds and the CMM still works.

Not all profiles does accept that. You need profiles that are implemented using enterly math expressions. Some very simple profiles works in such way, for example AdobeRGB. The sRGB profile does not work because it has curves implemented as tables, but the built-in sRGB does work as instead of tables it uses parametric curves. Also some advanced profiles for digital cameras using multiprocessing elements may work in unbounded mode. Right now it is hard to find any of those, as they are described in an addendum to the ICC spec.

Let's check this feature. Using AdobeRGB to the built-in  Lab in transicc:

C:\lcms-2.0\bin>transicc -i AdobeRGB1998.icc -o *Lab
LittleCMS ColorSpace conversion calculator - 4.0 [LittleCMS 2.00]
Enter values, 'q' to quit

R? 10
G? 10
B? 10
L*=0.7287 a*=0.0000 b*=-0.0000

Nothing special, but let's try this one

R? 300
G? 300
B? 300

L*=114.6770 a*=0.0006 b*=-0.0005

Do you see where I'm going? 300 is above 8 bits, and L*=114.6 is a highlight, so here you have an example of what can be accomplised with this mode.

New drop

Ok, so here is the september drop. That's functionality complete, that means all the functionality is already there and now it remains debugging and stabilizing. I am still in good shape for the schedule, so hopefully the first beta will be available on mid october.

New in this drop:

• error logging supersedes error plug-in, which is no longer available (it was a bad idead, indeed)
• black preservation intents are working
• TAC detection is working.
• All tags and tag types are correcly read/written
• Gray/RGB/CMYK/Lab/XYZ
• Info fns with localization, unicode
• Segment maxima gamut boundary descriptor

... And now back to the documentation, that's what is taken most of my time. First documentation draft will be available on next drop.