Bugs/feature requests importing images

CHROMiX ColorThink
1

(1) Would be awesome if ColorThink asked what profile to use on an intagged image. In case it matters, I’m running into this in the 3D graphing. Have an app that wrote a ProPhotoRGB image without tagging or embedding the profile. ColorThink graphs the colors undersaturated. Think it’s assuming it’s sRGB unless otherwise specified.

(2) Getting bizzare results graphing a LAB TIFF. From the same app mentioned in (1). I don’t know enough about the internal TIFF file structure to know if specifying the file is using LAB is enough, or if it also needs to specify a LAB profile. However, Photoshop opens this one just fine, recognizing that it’s LAB, and not asking about a missing or mismatched profile. You can download the LAB TIFF file at http://www.westlandprintworks.com/temp/lab-opens-weird-in-colorthink.tif

(3) Well, a feature request on this one. When graphing an installed profile, it takes forever to get to the right one. All I can do to “scroll” is press the down arrow at the bottom of ColorThink’s list. Holding it doesn’t go fast enough for how many profiles are on the system. Would be awesome if the arrow went much faster (but manageable) if pressed, or we got a scroll window. Would also be awesome if standard working spaces showed up top instead of alphabetically - like how sRGB/ProPhotoRGB/etc are up top in Photoshop.

2

Just thought I’d give you a few quick tips regarding the points you’ve mentioned in your post:

  1. I think here, the easiest thing to do would be to open the file in Ps and just apply the ProPhoto profile to the file in question and save said file, which will then be tagged with the ProPhoto profile and should graph correctly in ColorThink.

Also, how can a program write or create a ProPhoto image if the image doesn’t have the ProPhoto ICC profile embedded in it? The only thing that makes an RGB image an sRGB or AdobeRGB or any other RGB profile you care to choose, is that the image file actually has a copy of the entire ICC profile embedded into the contents of the image file itself. Otherwise, if your image file doesn’t have any profile embedded, it is just a bunch of RGB values - but those values are without any meaning if there’s no profile embedded as the only difference between a ProPhoto image and an sRGB image is the actual profile itself - the RGB values don’t change at all, as in if a particular pixel has RGB value of R46,G250,B7, those pixel values stay the same regardless of whether the file even has an embedded profile or if it has been tagged with ProPhoto or sRGB, etc.

So what I’m essentially saying is that it’s impossible for an app to write or create a ProPhoto image “without tagging or embedding the profile” because without tagging or embedding a profile, the image is just a bunch of RGB values, without any ‘colorimetric definition’ or any reference as to exactly which real world colours or hues are actually being specified.

  1. Not sure what you can do here as I too don’t know enough about the internal structure of TIFF files or anything at all about how an ICC profile is tagged to an image.

One thing I’m curious about is where you asked about “if specifying the file is using LAB is enough, or if it also needs to specify a LAB profile?”. When you say “specifying the file is using LAB”, what exactly do you mean, specifying? I’m just wondering where and/or how one would go about the specifying you ask about?

  1. I’m guessing that you’ve never noticed the ‘favorites’ menu option, directly above the ‘Installed’ menu you refer to, which you have to scroll for ever to get to your particular profile (ye, I also don’t like to have to wait SO long to scroll through all the profiles installed on my pc’s, and it does take a while to get through a long list of profiles, and when I just checked the color directory on the laptop I’m using now, there are currently 198 files in said directory. Not all of those files are ICC profiles, but a vast majority certainly are).

Well, here I can give you almost the solution you requested :wink: ColorThink already has a favourites section, so you can simply copy whichever profiles you most often want to access into the ColorThink favorites directory and only those profiles will show up in the much more manageable, and self-selected, list of profiles. You can find the necessary directory on a 32bit Windows system here:
C:\Program Files\CHROMiX\ColorThinkPro303\Profiles
and on a 64bit Windows system, here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\CHROMiX\ColorThinkPro303\Profiles

You can delete any or all of the profiles you find in this folder and populate it with only your own choice of profile if you so desire. Sub-folders can be created inside the favourites/Profiles folder, so that you might want to have one folder for RGB, another for CMYK, another for working spaces or any other way you might want to organise your profiles.

What I’ve been doing for over 7 years is to simply create a shortcut to the folder where ICC profiles are stored on a Windows system, the ‘color’ folder and I just open the folder when I’m going to be using ColorThink and just drag and drop whichever profile I wish to use with ColorThink. Much easier, more conveinient and heaps faster than scrolling through a menu and then a list, etc. In Windows Explorer, just click on any profile in the color folder and then to get to your specific profile, press the key which the profile starts with, so “A” for AdobeRGB, “P” for ProPhoto, etc., because this will take you to the first profile which starts with the letter/key you just pressed and then you can just find the specific file and drag it into ColorThink.

Anyway, I hope that helps you save some time or just makes ColorThink a little bit more user friendly.