The Adobe Color Mangement Module (CMM) is now available on Adobe Labs for community review and testing. So, what is this thing? In a nutshell, it’s the color converter part of the Adobe Color Engine (ACE), transformed into a library that can be used by non-Adobe apps. The upshot is that you can use a single color management engine across your workflow, enabling more consistent display and output of colors.
ACE is built into Adobe products and therefore can’t be used by non-Adobe products (Quark, etc.). This project takes a chunk of ACE (the color conversion engine) and packages it for use by applications that support external color management modules (using ColorSync on the Mac OS and ICM2/WCS on Windows). In-house color ninja Peter Constable adds, "Adobe hopes users will find the Adobe CMM a useful tool to
enable consistent, reliable, and accurate color in all parts of their color
workflows."
If the CMM sounds useful to you, please grab a copy, kick the tires, and let us know what you think. A dedicated discussion forum should pop up on Labs in another two weeks.
Thnak you for opening Adobe CMM up to 3rd party developers. We currently use littlecms. To bad it doesn’t support device link profiles.
Whoa, that sounds significant… didn’t this cost a lot to develop, and isn’t it a competitive advantage? What convinced us to give it away?
(Not rhetorical questions — I’d like to get a better idea of the dynamics here, what we’re hoping to achieve.)
tx, jd
This is awesome. I can’t remember how many times I heard someone in the color management lab at RIT express the desire to have the Adobe CMM more open for system level use.
[Cool–glad you like it! –J.]
Good first step John!
When will Adobe begin to support all ICC profile types? Example ICC device link profiles. The user community needs this functonality. We use this in other non Adobe applications, rips etc. but cannot use this profile type in Adobe Photoshop?
Thanks again for a great step forward.
Best regards,
Bob
Probably right after someone teaches Adobe’s product managers what device link profiles are and what they’re good for.
Ditto for multi channel separations.
John,
Kidding right? Device Link Profiles, allow printers a higher level of control over how colors are printed without taking them through PCS (Lab). Black preserving , but also simple LUT bassed color correction, to convert colors from one set of CMYK primaries to another. Example SWOP to ECI.
[Bob–yes, kidding. But I’ll admit that I personally could benefit from camping out for a few days and watching printers work. I’ll try to incorporate that into our next set of customer visits. –J.[
Hi John,
I know that sometimes some printers cause problems that result in us tearing our hair out, but I am hoping we have Colour Management rather than mangement:
‘mange
n : a persistent and contagious disease of the skin causing inflammation and itching and loss of hair; affects domestic animals (and sometimes people)
WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University’
Sorry! Twisted English humour!
[D’oh! Yeah, I picked up on that typo after the fact, but I didn’t want to screw up my RSS feed by tweaking the entry title. –J.]
I had also heard that ICC Link profiles were considered handy when using RIPs, so it does seem that some of your correspondents have a good point. Good move by Adobe, and I hear there is another in conjunction with the Mozilla Organisation…
Rod
55.exciting.
but after i download it from adobe labs.
i find it’s dificult to use.it needs user to add a registry value.i did as the readme file told.but it doesn’t work.
why don’t they make it as a install program?
or maybe it’s just a beta?
Hi John,
This is a great step forward for Color Management, but why dont you also make it possible to choose external CMM’s in Adobe applications, so that you can see what happens whit your files when you use other applications to handel the Color Management. Say you have bin working on a RGB image in Photoshop and want to see how the Seperation will be handled with a CMM from a external application ( preview and CMYK values).
//O.J
[Good question/request, Ole. I’ll have to look into getting more info when people return from break. –J.]