On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 3:59 AM, Arnon Namsanit <arnon.gimp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Dear GIMP developer team, > > My name is Arnon Namsanit. I am a Thailand government officer working > for the Ministry of Science and Technology. My team's main > responsibility is introducing the open source software to Thais > including GIMP. At the moment we are interested in introducing GIMP to > a group of users in publisher manufacturing therefore we have been > discussing about CMYK on GIMP. I might need to ask you some questions > please. > - Is there any people currently working on CMYK on GIMP? > - If yes, How? Can we join them? > - If no, Could we know the complexities or the problems of that please? > Since I am not a developer but my organization is able to set up a > team to implement the module. I would like to have your opinion on > this please. We are looking forward to hear from you. > > Kind Regards, Good morning, Arnon, The agrreded idea among GIMP developers is that CMYK as an _image editing mode_ will not be implemented in GIMP. Where as there maybe in the future more straightforward ways foreasier CMYK separation and printing. That is due to the fact that CMYK is more the mapping to inks of a printing method than a color mode. Even though this is the "de facto" printing method for volume, and even personal printing, CMYK values don't have a 1:1 mapping of color values as are visible to the eye, or representable in computer videos or images. (which color is "black" in an image? (100, 100, 100, 0), (0,0,0,100) or (100, 100, 100,100)? ) That said, for generating CMYK Tiff files as expected for some of today's printshops, and even allowing for some per-plate correction of the amount of colorants in each part of the image, there is the third party plug-in Separate+ ( http://cue.yellowmagic.info/softwares/separate-plus/ ) I believe that installing and getting used to that might your requirements for CMYK. So ..what is the idea for GIMP presently and on the long term, is that proper printing requires actually conversion between the color spaces of the various devices used in the press chain (video monitor, proof printer, large scale printer), making use of _color profiles_ . With proper calibration of devices and use of color profiles one can ensure that a color shade will look on paper, under certain lighting conditions, as it does look on the screen at editing time. All the time the colors are represented internally as an RGB tripplet, and just the printing driver, or software, takes care of mapping the normalized color to the actual colorants in use on the device - taking into account information on the device's color profile. On GIMP's roadmap, there lays, in the future, a way to preview a per plate separation of the image prior to having it exported to a CMYK file in a more integrated way than currently possible with the separate+ plug-in. But that depends on the implementation of a new, very different, U.I. that will allow for non-destructive editing, among other things. Work on this U.I. will start only after current development cycle (which will yield GIMP 2.8). Meanwhile, if you find that GIMP with the Separate+ plugin is not enough for your office's needs, there are other Open Source graphic editing programs that offer varying CMYK capabilities, such as Krita and Cinepaint. Regards, js -><- > > Arnon Namsanit > _______________________________________________ > Gimp-developer mailing list > Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer _______________________________________________ Gimp-developer mailing list Gimp-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gimp-developer
