Comment 22 for bug 498029

How to get a ICC-Profile for your scanner?

1.) Since M$ added ICC-based color management to Windoze Vista/7 scanner/printer/display vendors have switched from proprietary color management in their drivers/applications to shipping model-based ICC-profiles with the Windoze drivers! Just check the shipped Windoze Vista/7 drivers! ;-)

2.) If model-specfic profiles are not good enough or not available get a IT.8 target with a reference file (e.g. from http://www.targets.coloraid.de/), scan the reference file and feed GCM with the image and reference file to get a profile.

Which libraries to use for processing color management?

GCM uses Argyll, which has very fast and sophisticated libraries. So, to get high quality color management and keep dependencies low use Argyll, too.

How to decide whether to process color management or embed profile?

Most applications do not support color management, so

1. ) If scanning into FILE process raw data with scanner profile as source and SRGB profile as target! Additionally provide a 16-bit "Professional" preset scanning raw data with embedded scanner profile and without color space processing into a lossless TIFF file (don't use JPEG or PNG, as lossy encodings make NO sense for professional scans) .

2.) If directly sending scans to target devices with profiles (e.g. printer, display, etc.) use scanner profile as source and target profile to process color space (Argyll even allows to merge source device profiles and target device profiles to get quality and speed optimized mapping tables). If the target does not provide any profile, process raw data with scanner profile as source and SRGB or CMYK profile as target!