Add Color Profiles Support to PictView

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tajmone
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Joined: 24 Nov 2016, 20:49
Location: Italy
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Add Color Profiles Support to PictView

Post by tajmone »

I noticed that PictView does not manage embedded color profiles in images. This means that any embedded profiles will be simply discarded, leading to image previews with inexact colors. Usually the difference in colors is slight, but as the following screenshots demonstrate, the results can also lead to huge differences. For those working in the field of graphics design, color profile previewing is always important.

I'd really appreciate if you could add color profiles support in PictView, as it would allow me to work with images in AS without need to use other tools — sure, I could set AS to use an external previewer for images, but I like PictView and would love if it could one day support color profiles (and, possibly, even offer a choice to preview an image using the embedded color profile or discarding it, which could be useful to asses the image). There are lightweight FOSS libraries, like Little CMS, which allow to easily add color profile management to an app:

http://www.littlecms.com/

Here is how an image designed to test embedded color profiles should look like, previewed in Photoshop 7:

Screenshot - Photoshop.jpg
Screenshot - Photoshop.jpg (43.41 KiB) Viewed 52186 times


And here is how the same image shows in AS' PictView:


Screenshot -AltapSalamander Previwer.jpg
Screenshot -AltapSalamander Previwer.jpg (41.04 KiB) Viewed 52186 times

Of course, this image was purposefully designed to have a color profile that completely subverts the color hues in the palette; but the point is that PictView can't be used to faithfully compare different versions of an image whose embedded color profile was changed.

The test image used in the screenshot was taken from this link:

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1183489

This is a copy of the test image (which might show up in this post with the right colors or not, depending if your browser supports embedded color profiles):

png-color-profile-test.png
png-color-profile-test.png (8.03 KiB) Viewed 52186 times

... you can use the above image to see which image applications support embedded color profiles and which don't (and discard/ignore them).


Thanks,

Tristano (Italy)
https://github.com/tajmone