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Open Source Color Management Is Broken

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Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#61

Post by hughsient »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #20
Accacin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wrote a pretty detailed blog article explaining his issues and how he got around them, this is all very useful information to someone who is looking to do something similar. Spending €100 also isn't an insignificant amount, and for that price I would expect what I'm buying to work properly.

I don't understand that attitude, that's a pretty low price for a niche open hardware device.

It's barely more than the device costs to make. It turns out making batches of 50 at a time is an order of magnitude more expensive than building them 50,000 at a time.

Source: Am the person that sits in a shed and builds each ColorHug.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#62

Post by hughsient »

giovannicarruba wrote: post #40
Bitcoin_McPonzi wrote: post #32

Many of my (Hollywood) clients need to do color grading and other accurate color work. What platforms do they all use? Not Macintosh, despite its reputation for being the platform for "graphics professionals" (it was missing 10 bit/channel color until very recently). And not Linux, despite its use in render farms. They use Windows 10 and HP DreamColor monitors. That's the only platform that works and works well for p…

After reading this Linux rant and seeing how Apple is systematically marginalising its Pro customers, I'm actually inclined to believe you. Windows might be a pain for John Doe sometimes, but Microsoft also makes sure an insane amount of obscure professional features (like color management) keep working.

Apply hasn't cared about ColorSync for years. Every release they break something.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#63

Post by [deleted] »

wereHamster wrote: post #28
seba_dos1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the content is not in sRGB, don't you need to actually know the contents color profile in order to convert it to sRGB? How does the monitor profile matter at this point? (not challenging, just asking, I know next to nothing about color correction)

You don't want to convert to sRGB, you want to convert to the display device color space (which in professional displays is often larger than sRGB). Most desktop environments and applications assume that the source is sRGB, unless specifically tagged (in image metadata). So you have two points: source (image, video) and reproduction device (display, printer etc). And you convert colors from the former to the later. s…

[deleted]

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#64

Post by cornholio »

I think niche market software, used by a limited number of highly specialized professionals, is somewhat incompatible with the open source economic model. When a piece of software is used by very many users, and there is a strong overlap with coders or companies capable of coding, say an operating system or a a web server, open sources shines: there is adequate development investment by the power-users, in their regular course of using and adapting the software, that can be redistributed to regular users for free in an open, functional package.

At the other end of the spectrum, when the target audience is comprised of a small number of professionals that don't code, for example advanced graphic or music editors or an engineering toolbox, open source struggles to keep up with proprietary because the economic model is less adequate: each professional would gladly pay, say, $200 each to cover the development costs for a fantastic product they could use forever, but there is a prisoner dilema that your personal $200 donation does not make others pay and does not directly improve your experience. Because the userbase is small and non-software oriented, the occasional contributions from outside are rare, so the project is largely driven by the core authors who lack the resources to compete with proprietary software that can charge $200 per seat. And once the proprietary software becomes entrenched, there is a strong tendency for monopolistic behavior (Adobe) because of the large moat and no opportunity to fork, so people will be asked to pay $1000 per seat every year by the market leader simply because it can.

A solution I'm brainstorming could be a hybrid commercial & open source license with a limited, 5 year period where the software, provided with full source, is commercial and not free to copy (for these markets DRM is not necessary, license terms are enough to dissuade most professionals from making or using a rogue compile with license key verification disabled).

After the 5 year period, the software reverts to an open source hybrid, and anyone can fork it as open source, or publish a commercial derivative with the same time-limited protection. The company developing the software gets a chance to cover it's initial investment and must continue to invest in it to warant the price for the latest non-free release, or somebody else might release another free or cheap derivative starting from a 5-year old release. So the market leader could periodically change and people would only pay to use the most advanced and inovative branch, ensuring that development investment is paid for and then redistributed to everybody else.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#65

Post by hughsient »

Accacin wrote: post #7
gsich wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author cries about being not able to boot from the USB stick and that his ColorHug2 might be broken.

He wrote a pretty detailed blog article explaining his issues and how he got around them, this is all very useful information to someone who is looking to do something similar. Spending €100 also isn't an insignificant amount, and for that price I would expect what I'm buying to work properly.

The ColorHug is a colorimeter designed to calibrate screens with an approximately-sRGB gamut. If you're trying to calibrate a wide-gamut screen with a ColorHug it isn't going to work very well. If you need to do anything other than consumer hardware you need to use a spectrophotometer (that can do spectral profiling) rather than a colorimter that's calibrated to different primaries than what it's trying to measure. A spectro is going to cost you at least $300, and a good one is going to cost you somewhat more.

Source: Person that designed the ColorHug hardware.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#66

Post by danceparty »

Bitcoin_McPonzi wrote: post #32

Many of my (Hollywood) clients need to do color grading and other accurate color work. What platforms do they all use? Not Macintosh, despite its reputation for being the platform for "graphics professionals" (it was missing 10 bit/channel color until very recently). And not Linux, despite its use in render farms. They use Windows 10 and HP DreamColor monitors. That's the only platform that works and works well for p…

I don't agree, the entire visual effects industry, including their color departments, run on linux. Baselight and Resolve, are the two most common color correction programs in the industry, baselight exclusively runs on linux, and the big color companies (company 3, efilm, technicolor) all run resolve on linux. Coloring is done either on projectors, or broadcast monitors (something like a sony PVMA250 on the low end @ ~$6,000)

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#67

Post by drdaeman »

coldtea wrote: post #55
serf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That type of comment is also the underlying reason why Linux improves/fixes things at such an astronomical rate compared to either of the choices you listed. It's not just saying "Hey you, go fix that." , it's saying "Hey everyone viewing this comment on a public page : this exists and needs to be fixed. Someone grab a wrench."

> That type of comment is also the underlying reason why Linux improves/fixes things at such an astronomical rate compared to either of the choices you listed. Huh? Linux is behind both Windows and OS X in most non-server related areas. They can't even agree on a good compositor...

Except that there is no "they". Unlike with Windows or macOS there is no Microsoft or Apple to make decisions for the whole "ecosystem". There are distro vendors, but they're more like app stores shipping pre-configured pieces (including pieces that we consider to be core OS functionalities). And there are a lot of them, so lack of consensus is not surprising. And then many vendors offer options to install this-and-that, so it's up to users to decide what exactly they build on their machines...

Given that there is no such thing as just "Linux desktop" (I mean, my setup can be completely different from another persons' one), it's hard to say whenever it's ahead or behind, unless every component option is known to be such.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#68

Post by seba_dos1 »

Filligree wrote: post #37
serf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attitude that the cost gap between products in the same category will not be accounted for elsewhere in the user experience or product quality. tl;dr : you get what you pay for.

Cost gap? You mean, the ColorHug being more expensive than the other alternatives which work better? Ok, but I'm not sure how that explains it. You'll need to go into more detail.

As with most Open Hardware projects, you pay extra for the mere fact of the device's existence. Without paying extra, it wouldn't exist, because producing stuff in small amounts is way more expensive per device than producing them in high volumes.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#69

Post by 52-6F-62 »

Bitcoin_McPonzi wrote: post #32

Many of my (Hollywood) clients need to do color grading and other accurate color work. What platforms do they all use? Not Macintosh, despite its reputation for being the platform for "graphics professionals" (it was missing 10 bit/channel color until very recently). And not Linux, despite its use in render farms. They use Windows 10 and HP DreamColor monitors. That's the only platform that works and works well for p…

Anecdotal, but:

I currently work for a media conglomerate where colour tends to matter a lot to both the print and digital channels. I'm not sure which monitors they use as I tend to work rather separate from that group, but they all work on Macs—that's been the case since the late 80's early 90's in publishing and there seems to be no move to stray.

Re: Open Source Color Management Is Broken

#70

Post by anfractuosity »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #41
Bitcoin_McPonzi wrote: post #32

Many of my (Hollywood) clients need to do color grading and other accurate color work. What platforms do they all use? Not Macintosh, despite its reputation for being the platform for "graphics professionals" (it was missing 10 bit/channel color until very recently). And not Linux, despite its use in render farms. They use Windows 10 and HP DreamColor monitors. That's the only platform that works and works well for p…

I'm a colorist. Many of us do use windows, many use OSX, many more use Linux. Every major color critical application supports many types of LUTs and color management. Further, HP Dreamcolors have tons of problems and aren't considered solid for color critical work (but are fine for semi color accurate stuff like intermediate comps etc). Color accurate work is done over SDI with dedicated LUT boxes handling the color…

That's interesting regarding OLED, I thought over time the different colour LEDs decay at different rates?

A while ago I had a look at Eizo's 10 bit / channel TFTs, which looked impressive to me (from a layman's perspective), do you have any opinions of those?

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