Application Structure

[Lamplitr Profile]

A couple of thoughts have occurred to me from the beginning which I'd like to offer. Unlike Portrait Professional, SPE allows and encourages many image modifications which can be considered quite destructive to a JPG file. Heavily manipulating a typical 8-bit image file will undoubtedly destroy what little pixel information it contained and throw it so far out of gamut that trying to decently print it would be useless. On another level, this software should not be promoted or operated as a substitute RAW file converter, which I noted some testers reported doing. That leaves the TIF file structure and a wide gamut color working space (ProPhoto RGB etc.) as the only viable formats which can fully accommodate the wide scope of these allowed modifications.

I would suggest - at the file input stage - forcing all image files opened in SPE to be automatically and transparently converted to 16-bit TIF (48-bit color) format for the pipeline duration of the editing process. My thought here is to keep this software from being blamed for the potential posterization and out of gamut results that a non-sophisticated JPG manipulator - turned loose here in DisneyLand - is going to cause.

Along this same thought, there should be provision in the setup menu to user-select both a "Monitor Profile" and a "Working Color Space". The consequences for properly setting up his editing space should be the sole responsibility of the end user and not become a cause for the SPE software to be faulted.

Saved and/or exported files need to have a user-selected color profile tag applied, with the software defaulting to 16-bit TIF and tagged with the users current working space profile chosen unless he chooses a different output profile (through a menu choice) at the output stage.

Exif information should be retained from the original input file through to the output file without being modified or destroyed.

Memory management may prove an issue if using the recommended TIF file format and allowing any capability for batch processing. Some thought as to whether "batch processing" should even be considered as a viable feature of this software needs attention - - a feature I wouldn't recommend at all at this point.

Some of these thoughts may potentially be a bragging point when directed toward the commercial user who typically sets these parameters as a minimum. I hope this is a helpful input to you and where already implemented, or misunderstood by me, please ignore my redundancy.

[admin]

Thanks for your feedback. I think all of what you said makes sense. Our 'colour profile guy' is on holiday at the moment, but when he's back I'll see if he has anything to add.