On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 23:42:55 +0100, Gerhard Gaußling > If you apply a conversion to the file there will be a loss of color > information, so it's necessary, that we avoid unneeded conversions to the > original file. > For some filters and operations to be correct, the image data needs to be in a color space with linear light. (e.g. not gamma corrected for CRT display devices). Operations that need linear light to be correct: gaussian blurs smudge anti aliased brush strokes soften brightness / contrast adjustments resampling (scaling an image up/down, rotating etc.) To avoid extra conversions whenever such a filter is applied to an image, having a standard working space that has linear light will decrease the total number of conversions needed. Doing the custom conversion and countermeasures to account for gamma in all these operations will introduce quantification whenever such an operation is performed, less conversions are better, and a consistent high range internal working space is the path to the lowest number of conversions whenever any of the above listed operations are done. This is why I am advocating that gimp/GEGL should prefer to work, save and load in a preferred working color space. For multiple loads/edits of a project the conversion to a preferred internal working space already have happened when you load an image using gimps own file format. other image file formats are not suited as intermediate formats for saving an image that is being edited (for the same reasons that you shouldn't use lossy compression,. compression through generations/multiple unneeded conversions degrades your image) When exporting from gimps internal file format to display / printer / other file format with embedded icc profile, the image data shouldn't be touched by gimp again. /Øyvind K. -- Software patents hinder progress | http://swpat.ffii.org/ Web : http://pippin.gimp.org/
