[Scribus] CMYK image processing (was: Newbie question: blending photos.)

[Craig Ringer]

On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 10:37:07AM +0100, Helmut Wollmersdorfer wrote:
> http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/hacking/krita
> | 2005-11-10
> | From the promising-but-not-yet-usable-department.
> 
> The above sentence says it all.
> 
> Next I tried cinepaint 0.20-1 (Debian unstable), which has 
> CMYK/ICC-support, but is unusable, crashes, has bad usability, and my 
> trials to convert a RGB.jpg into a CMYK.tif resulted in an unreadable file.
> 
> Next I did some research on CMYK-support of GIMP.
> There is a feature request in the bugtracking of GIMP:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=123598
> opened  2003-09-30 (!).
> 
> There is no visible activity from the GIMP-developers on this problem 
> since 2.5 years. I know the more or less (more less;-) usable plug-ins.
> Additionally you can find discussions about the ignorance of the 
> GIMP-developers.

Ignorance is relative. It's true that some GIMP folks haven't recognised
the need for CMYK etc, but others certainly do, and I think
understanding is growing (of course, CMYK is becoming less important at
the same time due to better colour management and so on - they make the
IMO valid point that really CMYK should be the RIPs problem).

At LGM yesterday a working version of GEGL, then "next-generation"
16-bit capable, CMYK-capable, colour-management supporting GIMP image
processing engine was demonstrated. It's veen vapourware for a long time
but looks like it's been turned into a real working library, albeit not
yet a fully finished and stable one.

Things may be looking up in that department.

-- 
Craig Ringer