ColorSync 2.1 Overview
The ColorSync Manager provides your application or color peripheral device driver with device-independent color-matching and color-conversion services.The revised advanced color imaging books provide information on the many new features available in version 2.1 of the ColorSync Manager, including
The section "ColorSync 2.1 Changes" describes these features in greater detail and provides hypertext links to new and changed material in the revised advanced color imaging books.
- procedure-based profiles: You can specify your own profile-access procedure that ColorSync will call when the profile is created, initialized, opened, read, updated, or closed.
- support for named color spaces: The ColorSync Manager provides data structures and routines for working with named color spaces.
- profile identifiers: The ColorSync Manager defines the profile identifier, an abbreviated data structure that identifies, and possibly specifies the rendering intent for, a profile in memory or on disk. An embedded profile identifier requires much less space than an entire profile.
- additional PostScript
ª support: Postscript Level 2 now supports up to four-component color spaces. This allows the creation of device-independent color space definitions that can support calibrated CMYK spaces and provide more flexible support for calibrated scanner and monitor spaces.- color conversion without components: Color conversion routines are an integral part of the ColorSync Manager and are no longer implemented as a separate component.
- support for new bitmap formats: The ColorSync Manager supports bitmap formats for many additional color spaces, including 24-bit RGB, 32-bit RGB with an alpha last channel, and 24-bit Lab.
- profile reference counts: The ColorSync Manager maintains an internal reference count for each profile reference so that it can efficiently free private memory associated with that profile reference once it is no longer in use.
- profile changed flag: The ColorSync Manager maintains a flag that indicates whether the content of a profile has changed.
- speed and accuracy enhancements: You can use a "lookup only" flag to skip interpolation and speed up runtime color conversion. You can also disable gamut checking to speed up initialization and reduce profile size.
- revised sample application: A revised version of the CSDemo application provides sample code that demonstrates how to use many of the new features of ColorSync 2.1.
A Note on ColorSync Versions
This document and the advanced color imaging books use "ColorSync Manager" or "ColorSync" to refer to version 2.1. They use a specific version number, such as "ColorSync 1.0," only where necessary to identify features associated with a particular version. They most commonly use "2.x" to refer to the International Color Consortium (ICC) profile reference format version used by version 2.0 and later of the ColorSync Manager. However, where appropriate, they may use "2.x" to refer inclusively to ColorSync versions 2.0 and 2.1.If you need documentation for version 2.0 of the ColorSync Manager, see "Obtaining the Original Advanced Color Imaging Books" in this document.
Backward Compatibility
Most existing code written to use version 2.0 of the ColorSync Manager should continue to work with version 2.1 without modification.Although ColorSync 1.0 used a proprietary profile format, the ColorSync Manager provides backward compatibility for applications and device drivers written for ColorSync 1.0. Your application that uses the ColorSync Manager can match, convert, and gamut check colors using version 2.x profiles or, when necessary, a combination of version 2.x profiles and ColorSync 1.0 profiles. For a description of the backward compatibility support provided by the ColorSync Manager, see the appendix, "ColorSync Manager Backward Compatibility," in Advanced Color Imaging on the Mac OS.
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