An interview with Hal Engel

An interview from LProf lead developer, Hal Engel, by Alexandre Prokoudine. Packed with interesting stuff about LProf – where it comes from where it is now and where it aims to go. Good bits about (GUI) support for monitor calibration, Color Management in general, areas that need most help, Google Summer of Code.

I can’t resist quoting this question in full:

Besides proper color management on all production stages, what do you think could make Linux a viable platform for, say, digital photography?

One of the big hangups right now is the lack of more than 8 bit/channel support in a full featured image editor. We have this support in Cinepaint and Krita, but these editors are missing features that are needed by many photographers. GIMP has a good feature set but only supports 8 bit/channel images. I am hopeful that once GIMP migrates to the GEGL backend that this will no longer be an issue. Still this is likely at least 6 months to a year away.

On a side note, I tried LProf from CVS a couple of times to get Monitor Profiles with the Spyder, but without much luck getting useable profiles – both dispwin and xcalib would fail loading the ICC profiles produced with LProf. But I keep on trying and will report as soon as there is some good news.