I'm pleased to announce that version 1.11.0 of LPROF is now available. LPROF is an open source application that will create ICC profiles for use with other applications such as Scribus, CinePaint, Krita, UFRAW and the development version of GIMP. This is the first development snap shot of the work that has been underway since LPROF became a SourceForge project. Please see the LPROF SourceForge web pages http://sourceforge.net/projects/lprof

This is a development snap shot of what will become version 1.12 when it is stable. Although testing by the development team indicates that this snap shot appears to be stable it is a development release and as such it should not considered to be a stable release. It has not been extensively tested and may have significant unknown bugs. This is being made available so that users can test the new release and report problems and make suggestions for improvements.

The major goals of this version are:

1.Consolidation of the user interface into a single executable to facilitate an improved and simplified work flow. 2.Elimination or a major reduction of duplicate code to facilitate maintenance and future enhancements.
3.Use of a standardized location for storing configuration information. 4.Improved documentation and the addition of a help system. 5.Increased portability.

Significant changes in this version include:

1.A unified user interface with a greatly simplified work flow. 2.The user interface and logic for placing the IT8.7 picker template has been hugely improved and will now work for skewed chart images that would have been impossible to use with the old picker template positioning user interface. The user interface is also much simpler to use. 3.A new help system has been implemented and new documentation written for the help system. This includes information on how to use this version of LPROF and there is also has a section on how to create profiles for use with UFRAW. 4.The charts for setting monitor gamma in the rough monitor profiler are now the Norman Koren gamma charts. These are being used with the permission of Norman Koren. These new charts will also help users set the black point for their monitors. See http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html for more information about these charts. 5.LPROF now uses system standard locations for saving and locating profiles by default. On Linux/Unix systems profiles will be saved to $HOME/.color/icc and when looking for profiles it will look in /usr/share/color/icc if these directories exist. On Windows systems it will use the default Windows directory for ICC profiles (normally c: \Windows\system32\spool\drivers\color). Users can specify other locations. 6.LPROF configuration and temporary files are now stored in $HOME/.lprof. 7.On Linux systems SCons is now used as the build system. The SCons build is not currently working on Windows or other platforms. 8.The library used to support tiff IT8.7 target images has been changed from QTiffIO to TiffIO for increased portability (QTiffIO does not build on Windows). LPROF can be built and will run without this library installed but it will not support the use of tiff files unless this library is installed. 9. A new target reference file installer has been added. This installs target reference files in a standard location and also requires the user to select the correct picker template when installing a new target reference file. LPROF will automatically use the specified picker template when ever the user selects a target reference file in the Camera/Scanner Profiler tab. 10.A significant amount of work has been done on Windows portability issues and most of the features are working on Windows systems. 11.Some work has been done to insure that this will run on big-endian systems. This code still needs to be tested. (The development team only has access to little-endian hardware).
12.A bunch of other bug fixes and improvements.

Please feel free to download, build, install and test the development snap shot. User feedback is very much appreciated. In addition, LPROF could use your help in other ways and we are looking for volunteers to handle various tasks. For example, I would really like to have someone work on getting the Windows SCons build working correctly and there are many other areas where we could use additional help. Many of the things that need to be done are non-technical so even those that do not have a technical back ground can contribute. Please contact me if you would like to get involved in this effort in any way.