Black Five Imaging

Lack Of Updates

To anyone hoping for an update to PhotoPrint, CMYKTool or any of the other projects here, I owe you an apology.

Due to a number of factors (including a workload that shows no immediate sign of abating, and waning interest due to the direction in which computers in general and mainstream Linux distributions in particular are heading) these projects are on semi-permanent hiatus. Despite that, I do hope to get back to them sometime in the not too distant future, at least to fix a nasty PhotoPrint UI bug that's surfaced in the latest Ubuntu - but for the forseeable future there'll be no major updates.

GIT repo update

I've made a few changes to my git repository at https://gitorious.org/~blackfiveimaging. PhotoPrint and CMYKTool have been updated such that they no longer use symlink tricks to draw in code from the library. Instead they now use git submodules. The other projects will follow suit eventually.

To checkout CMYKTool after this change, you'd do the following

git clone git://gitorious.org/black-five-imaging/cmyktool.git
cd cmyktool
git submodule init
git submodule update

Finally - a GIT repository

Several people have expressed an interest in a possible Git respository of my projects, and I've finally found time to set one up.

The repo can be found at https://gitorious.org/~blackfiveimaging. Please note, however, that because of the way my projects are currently organised, you'll need to check out at least two respositories. There is a "library" repo that's shared between the various projects, and this library must be in the same top level directory as any project which uses it (the reason is that whole directories from the library are symlinked into the project.)

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Duotoner 0.1.0-pre2 Released

A bug-fix release to addres an issue that has been found on machines that don't have a system-wide monitor profile set. This version should correctly use sRGB as a destination profile for the preview, instead of simply crashing.

Beyond that, very few changes, just those tweaks that DuoToner inherits from CMYKTool and PhotoPrint development as a result of sharing so much library code with those projects.

Source code - .tar.gz

Windows Binary - .zip

Please note: the Windows build requires an existing GTK+ installation - the easiest way to get this is to install InkScape or Gimp 2.6.

Cups Test Rig

It was recently announced that the next version of Ubuntu would feature a colour-management-capable pdftoraster filter, based on Poppler. I wanted to find out more about this, and give it a spin to see how it works, and since for another project I've been learning how to create live ISO images, I created a simple live image from the current Ubuntu Natty repos. This live installation features a virtual CUPS printer that generates images from submitted jobs, and a web server through which you can view the results.

ISO image

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RasterToTiff 0.1.0 Released

RasterToTiff is a CUPS filter intended to aid in the development of a colour-managed printing chain. To save on ink, you can set up a dummy printer that uses rastertotiff, and instead of printing the result, it saves the result off for on-screen inspection.

By default it saves the generated images in /var/www/spool - the idea being that you can view the results with a web browser.

Source code - .tar.gz

(The source package probably seems massive for such a simple tool - that's because I've just taken the framework around which PhotoPrint and CMYKTool are built, and hastily written this tool against it.)

As well as the source to rastertotiff, the package also contains a "null" backend for CUPS, and a few ICC profiles that give obvious and distinct results, for debugging purposes, and an example PPD file.

As always, this is experimental software. There's no documenation as such, but do get in touch if you want to make use of it but are stuck. I will shortly publish a live ISO image that can be used to try rastertotiff (and colour-management within CUPS in general) without having to worry about installation or configuration.

GPLin 0.0.1-pre10 Released

Not really a release as such - just opening up the few changes I've made since the last release. Work on GPLin has more or less stopped now, since other projects have taken precedence in what little coding time I have these days. However, there have been a number of changes and improvements in the framework that all my graphics projects have in common, and there have been a few minor improvements to GPLin itself, so I'm putting this out in the hope that someone might find it useful.

GPlin-0.0.1-pre10.tar.gz

GPlin-0.0.1-pre10_bin.zip (Experimental Windows binaries)

Please note: the Windows build is experimential. It requires an existing GTK+ installation - the easiest way to get that is to install GIMP. Note also that GPLin cannot print using native drivers - instead it comes equipped with a Win32 build of Gutenprint.

My Quest For A Quiet Computer Revisited

Some years ago I wrote about my Quest for a Quiet Computer – in which I bought a fanless VIA EPIAmotherboard and a nice mini case (Morex Cubid 2677). It was a tight squeeze, but it all fit and it gave a good few years’ service as an email-reading terminal. Unfortunately, the 500MHz VIA Eden processor was a bit on the slow side, as was the Trident CyberBlade i1 graphics chip. The machine didn’t have a prayer of playing a DVD (For comparison, my old Pentium III laptop of the same clock speed could manage that with no trouble providing nothing else was going on in the background.)

Intel D510MO motherboard

Since then I’ve been keeping one eye on the Mini-ITX market, and was intrigued by Intel’s Little Falls boards, which coupled a netbook-style Atom processor with a regular Desktop G31 chipset. The downside of those boards was the power-hungry chipset, which ate way more power than the processor it was supposed to be supporting. The newer Pine Trail boards, though, including the D510MO which I’ve just bought, couples the new low-power NM10 chipset with an Atom processor which is not only 64-bit capable, but also dual core, while using little enough power that passive cooling is sufficient!

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CMYKTool 0.1.6-pre1 Released

There aren't many user-visible changes to this first development release of 0.1.6, but I wanted to get the headline new feature out there for testing purposes.

CMYKTool is now capable of preserving clipping paths in TIFF images. (It does this by preserving the entire Photoshop Image Resource Block, if found). The Image Resource Block can be loaded from JPEG images, too, but not yet saved in jPEGs.
There are some major under-the-hood changes to resource tracking and allocation, which will hopefully improve stability in the long run, but for now may have the opposite effect, so be warned!

Source code - .tar.gz

Windows Binary - .zip

Please note: the Windows build requires an existing GTK+ installation - the easiest way to get this is to install either Inkscape or GIMP version 2.6 or earlier.

Gimp Classic for Maverick

The title says it all really - the GIMP Classic PPA now contains a build for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

To install the updated package for Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10, add ppa:amr/gimp-classic to your software sources, then upgrade GIMP.

CMYKTool Devicelink Tutorial

In my last video i mentioned that CMYKTool's Devicelink support probably deserved a video to itself. That video has finally arrived - hope you find it helpful!

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CMYKTool 0.1.5 Released

Just in time for the New Year, CMYKTool 0.1.5 is released. Highlights since the 0.1.4 release include:

Better support for greyscale images, and an embedded greyscale profile will no longer cause an error.
Optional dithering of images when saving in 8-bit formats. This can help if you have an image with very smooth gradients that end up visibly contoured once the image is saved. (But note that it won't help get rid of contouring in the original image!)
DeviceLink profiles can now be exported for use in other programs.
The Win32 build now bundles a couple of CMYK profiles from the openicc-data package, which can be found here.

Source code - .tar.gz

Ubuntu PPA - ppa:amr/blackfiveimaging

Windows Binary - .zip

Please note: the Windows build requires an existing GTK+ installation - the easiest way to get this is to install either Inkscape or GIMP version 2.6 or earlier.

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Creating a Custom Profiling Target

When generating a colour profile for a scanner or camera there are several standard targets that are traditionally used. The most widely-recognised of these is probably the IT8.7/2 chart, with its spread of greys, synthetic colours and real-world shades. There are other options too, such as the ColorChecker DC or SG charts, but what if you want to create your own chart?

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CMYKTool 0.1.5-rc1 Released

At long last, a release candidate for CMYKTool 0.1.5. Apart from a few bug fixes, there are just a handful of significant new features.

Firstly, greyscale images are now better supported, and an embedded greyscale profile will no longer cause an error.
Secondly, images can now be dithered when saving in 8-bit formats. This can help if you have an image with very smooth gradients that end up visibly contoured once the image is saved. (But note that it won't help get rid of contouring in the original image!)
The Win32 build now bundles a couple of CMYK profiles from the openicc-data package, which can be found here.

Assuming no show-stopping bugs crop up in the meantime, I hope I'll be able to make a final release of 0.1.5 soon.

There are a few new strings, a couple to do with the output dithering, and a couple of new error messages. Updated translations gratefully received, as always, and I shall make sure they make it into the final release.

Source code - .tar.gz

Windows Binary - .zip

Please note: the Windows build requires an existing GTK+ installation - the easiest way to get this is to install either Inkscape or GIMP version 2.6 or earlier.

Another PPA Update

The eagle-eyed among you might just have spotted that my PPA list now includes a new entry for Gutenprint. The reason for this is that I wanted an easy way of distributing a particular patch - namely my PSSpeedup patch. This patch, as it name might suggest, provides a significant speedup when using Gutenprint's Adobe Postscript Level 2 driver. As such, this is potentially useful for anyone using PhotoPrint in conjunction with HP-IJS, TurboPrint, the Avasys Epson drivers, laser printers that understand Postscript, and anything else not directly supported by Gutenprint, but for which Linux drivers are available.

Note that this is the stock Ubuntu package of Gutenprint 5.2.6, taken from version 10.10 (Maverick), with the one extra patch applied. While the PPA contains the same version for Lucid, this was actually done accidentally! Since it might turn out to be a useful backport for some people, I've left the Lucid version there - but use at your own risk.

To install the updated package for Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10, add ppa:amr/gutenprint to your software sources, then upgrade all gutenprint packages.

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