[sane-devel] Color profiles with SANE?

[Major A]

> I'm afraid that you will not have much luck with the current Sane 
> version. But I think that ICC profiles should be supported in Sane 2. 
> (With littlecms (http://www.littlecms.com) we have a good LGPL-ed ICC 
> library available, so we _can_ actually support ICC. And with Scarse - 
> Scanner CAlibration ReaSonably Easy - http://www.scarse.org/ - there 
> even a calibration tool under development.)

Also, never forget gcms, which is under GPL...

> While most of the calibration stuff should be done in the frontend, I 
> think that the backends should be able to provide the ICC profiles. The 
> profiles are closely tied to a certain device, and, as Rene mentioned, 
> it is not very convenient to configure a number of workstations in a 
> network for the same scanner. And a backend could automatically select 
> the right profile, when for example a transparency adapter is switched 
> on or off. Film scanners might provide special profiles for different 
> film types.

I agree. It should be possible to extract the profile from the
backend. Once this is done, it should be pretty easy to incorporate an
ICC library into a frontend like xsane. The harder part will of course
be having part of the colour conversion done by the scanner, with the
LUTs. On scanners with >8bit output, this shouldn't make much of a
difference in quality, though.

> I don't think that we need some additional functions in the Sane API for 
> this purpose -- it would probably be enough to define an additonal frame 
> type, or even only to add something like a "well known mime type" for 
> SANE_FRAME_MIME.

Or we could simply add a standard option that gives the frontend the
name of the file. This, of course, would mean that the computer with
the frontend has to have the profiles in a known place, but it also
relieves the backend from doing it's own file i/o.

  Andras

===========================================================================
Major Andras
    e-mail: andras at users.sourceforge.net
    www:    http://andras.webhop.org/
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