Hi Nathan,
Nathan Carl Summers wrote:
Wait -- the color selectors need to be filtered on a per-image basis as well. What if you are working in very different colorspaces for two images? It does you no good to select a color in the gamut of one image if you really wanted to select for the other one -- that color might not even be in the gamut of the the other image!
You're quite right, but it's not possible at the moment to associate the colour selector with a given image; this was one of the chief arguments in favour of a fixed working space. I envisage the vast majority of work being done in the GIMP's working space, but for advanced uses, I think the ability to override this working space is important. The plugin / dialog or whatever is used to do this will have to include warnings about the color selector not matching the image if its colorspace is overridden.
Personally I envisage needing the ability to override the working profile for two things:
Firstly, tagging a scanned image with the scanner's profile. If the scanned image is a photograph, then the colour selector isn't likely to be used anyway - my photo editing usually involves layer->colors->curves, and the clone tool. If the user needs to pick a colour, he/she can always use the eye-dropper to grab one that's already in the image.
If the scanned image is a logo or similar, then converting to sRGB is no hardship anyway, so the problem can be bypassed.
The second reason I want to be able to override the working space is that the fake CMYK colour mode of my separate plugin uses a layer in darken only mode to do naive R=1-C type CMYK->RGB conversion, which gives over-saturated colours; with the aid of a custom profile, this can be much improved.
While the issues with having a fixed profile for the colour selector are real, I think it's acceptable as long as inexperienced users aren't confronted with it. Only advanced users are likely to want this feature, and they can be expected to be savvy enough to understand the implications and work around them.
All the best, -- Alastair M. Robinson
