Re: [CSS3 Colors] HSL colors, hue and allowed values, [CSS3 gcpm] CMYK colors and allowed values.

On Jul 31, 2009, at 1:00 AM, Thomas Phinney wrote:
>
> I'm curious, do browsers actually do color management with RGB colors
> today, treating them as sRGB and doing further things with that
> information?

There are arguably two levels of color management for display:

1. Honor embedded profiles in images. This level of support has been  
in Safari 3 and 4, and Firefox 3.5 and is the default behavior.
2. Optionally assume sRGB for all other content (minus content managed  
by plugins), including CSS. This is an option in FireFox 3.5, and IE  
on Mac OS X (which is of course quite old). I'm not aware of any others.


> Personally, I use unmanaged CMYK quite frequently and am happy to do
> so. I have a CMYK printer, and for certain purposes I often want to
> specify things just in terms of ink proportions so as to get
> relatively "clean" colors to act as spot colors (e.g. printing a true
> 50%K 100%M with no other colors mixed in due to color management).
> However, I won't claim to be the typical CSS author, and I don't know
> that I'd use unmanaged CMYK in CSS very often.

This describes a possible need for encoding in CMYK. There is a class  
of ICC profile called the devicelink profile which can be built to  
behave the way you want which is to give you mostly color managed  
output but without things like "scum dots". There aren't many contexts  
where scum dots are a real problem, but instead are perceived to be a  
problem mostly because people are looking closer at the print than  
would ever be done in the real world. But the ability to encode  
directly in CMYK should include a required reference to the intended  
CMYK output process.

Chris

Received on Friday, 31 July 2009 12:38:05 UTC