Under the subheading “Opening existing files” it says “Another new feature is being able to open CMYK JPEG, TIFF, and PSD files” and it “…convert pixel data to GIMP’s sRGB…”.
I don’t understand what the new feature is. Isn’t that the current behaviour in the stable version?
This is again a very interesting article, many thanks! I came across CMYK issues with print shops a couple of times, but this was many years ago. As I am not using the adobe tools, I never understood the issue as I only was able to do a late transform. But now I am a bit curious. Would there be real benefits in an early binding? Preview accuracy would probably not be much better as a CMYK → RGB transform has to be performed anyway, and only the colors available in both color spaces (CMYK working space and RGB display space) could be viewed correctly. The only benefit I can see therefore from early binding is that it is much less likely to produce colors which are outside the CMYK output space if it is the working space at the same time. But I can hardly imagine that this benefit is so important that it rectifies a whole set of CMYK pixel tools. But maybe that’s a fallacy, so I would be very interested in the reasons for a full CMYK workflow over “only” a CMYK output transform. (OK, for the print shop that’s a different story when halftone patterns have to be generated etc., but for image processing …)
The stable version of GIMP only opens CMYK TIFF files, this feature was backported from the unstable branch a while ago. If you try to open CMYK JPEG or CMYK PSD files in the stable branch, you’ll see this kind of an error message:
Opening '/home/user/folder/file.psd' failed:
Error loading PSD file: Unsupported color mode: CMYK
Thank you very much for your reply.