Color Management in PSP X3

[David Milisock]

I'm looking to see if there are any users who are experiencing color management issues in PSP X3 with regard to coordinating with CorelDRAW, Corel Photo-PAINT and Adobe products. I wish to identify issues and develop resolutions for printing and cross application suport. I've been providing professional level support for Adobe and Corel for 20 years and am adding PSP to my list of tools for creation and support.

[ronzie]

I only have PSPPX3 but you'll find three CM posts here to which I contributed.

1. PSPPX3 only provides CM printer support for soft proofing. I does not drive the printer with CM like Photoshop can. That is confusing to some users. I use QImage Pro for printing tiffs output from PSPPX3 and also verify the softproof. I can say that the soft proof from QImage and PSPPX3 do match on the calibrated display unit.

2. When using printer profiles I have discovered that using version 4 profiles in PSPPX3 with proof mode active prevents the dialog portion of many tools from appearing. In other words I will not see the histogram or color palette windows of the associated tools. V2 profiles work fine. The V4 profiles I have are created with a ColorMunki Photo software release 1.11. Version 2 ColorMunki printer profiles do not display this problem.

Profile version numbers can be seen with these free tools from the ICC resource site:

http://www.color.org/resource2.xalter

Profile Dump - an example utility built using SampleICC that reads profiles and checks them for conformance .
ICC Profile Inspector - opens an ICC profile and makes the contents readable.

3. With Patch 3 I found that certain processing such as cropping of 16 bit tif files imported from a Canon software utility can produce corrupted thumbnails in Organizer. See that recent post for samples. The images still loaded correctly in the Organizer preview window and full editor. I did not see this problem with Patch 2.

[David Milisock]

If memory serves you're using XP Pro OS is that correct?

I assume that PSP is using ICM 2.2 color engine in XP and ICM 3.0 in Vista and Windows 7.

Do you concurr?

[ronzie]

I assume you are talking Win XP Pro system modules:

icm32.dll - 5.1.2600.5512
icmui.dll is the same version.
gdi32.dll - 5.1.2600.5698

I am om SP3 of XP Pro.

Give me the file names and path/folder of versions you are interested in and I'll be happy to oblige.

I register icc/icm profiles with the downloaded XP applet from Microsoft. It is my preference as I prefer that GUI.

[David Milisock]

What I'm talking about is the default color engines for the Windows OS, XP uses ICM CMM 2.2 and any application like PSP X3 that does not allow the user to manage that aspect of the color management interface has no choice but to do this or to load it's own engine. In Vista and Windows 7 ICC conversion is handled by ICM 3.0 and CMP profiles are handled by WCS and I assume the same standard deault color engines are mandated as PSP X3 has no such control for the user. Vista and Windows 7 regardless of colorengie chosen uses WCS for conversion where an IC profile is being convert to a CMP profile or visa versa.

The only other thing that could be taking place is for PSP to have it's own color engine which I doubt. CorelDRAW X5 allows MS ICM, 2.2 in XP and 3 in others, LCMS, Adobe CMM. Adobe allows, MS ICM and Adobe ACE and CMM.

Hopefully for X4 PSP they will allow the user to chose WCS color engine as the MS ICM CMM is licensed from Heidelberg which is the old LinoColor engine. The conversions are much smoother with WCS.

I have a call into Corel to find out exactly what they're doing for the color engine.