2002.09.19 15:26 "Re: TIFF Curious", by Chris 'Xenon' Hanson

We process in Photoshop, using custom actions, and a set of adjustments set using the Intellihance plugin.

The image adjustment is basically to decrease the gamma to compensate for over-inking on the press (because we are not printing on good paper, the dot gain is high). There are also similar adjustments if the pic is colour.

The cost of using Photoshop is high - not only financially (72 copies in my region) - but more importantly we pay a price for flexibility. The original system was designed using Photoshop 5. Photoshop 6 didn't understand some of the actions, sowe had to rewrite. There were other problems.

It would all be a lot easier to control if we could do away with Photoshop for this process, and have something more automated and still controllable that would perform the same task.

I would be interested in your collective thoughts and observations.

It would seem if you're mildly open to such a change that you could accomplish your automation needs and solve your licensing dilemma by switching to a more open image processing system. The Gimp (available for Linux and Windows, and maybe others to) has a powerful scripting system, and is Open Source.

It's not quite as 'slick' as Photoshop if you intend to use it for other Photoshop-like tasks, but if all you want to do is your custom processing, it should be fine.

I'm not familiar with how extensive The Gimp's TIFF and/or CMYK support might be, and I'm not familiar with the complexity of your needs, but it's certainly worth a look.

If it doesn't quite do what you want, source is of course available, and it's always easier to start with something that already works and does 95% of what you need than to start from scratch. You could also look at stringing together things like NetPBM and such, but they're even cruder.

I've heard that ImageMagick is nice too.

I imagine I'll get a gruff response from Chris Cox now. ;)

Chris - Xenon
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