2014-11-20

The last days I played with lcms‘ unbound mode. In unbound mode the CMM can convert colours with negative numbers. That allows to use for instance the LMS colour space, a very basic colour space to the human visual system. As well unbound RGB, linear gamma with sRGB primaries, circulated long time as the new one covers all colour space, a kind of replacement of ICC or WCS style colour management. There are some reservations about that statement, as linear RGB is most often understood as “no additional info needed”, which is not easy to build a flexible CMS upon. During the last days I hacked lcms to write the mpet tag in its device link profiles in order to work inside the Oyranos CMS. The multi processing elements tag type (mpet) contains the internal state of lcms’ transform as a rendering pipeline. This pipeline is able to do unbound colour transforms, if no table based elements are included. The tested device link contained single gamma values and matrixes in its D2B0 mpet tag. The Oyranos image-display application renderd my LMS test pictures correctly, in opposite to the 16-bit integer version. However the speed was decreased by a factor of ~3 with lcms compared to the usual integer math transforms. The most time consuming part might be the pow() call in the equation. It is possible that GPU conversions are much faster, only I am not aware of a implementation of mpet transforms on the GPU.

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