[GRASS-dev] r.what.color questions

[Glynn Clements]

Hamish wrote:

> > 3. R/G/B vs B/G/R.
> 
> I saw the reference to that in the man page, what uses BGR?

Nothing in GRASS uses it; I don't know how useful it would be
externally. Ultimately, you can always swap the fields by other means,
e.g. awk '{print $3,$2,$1}'.

> Is CMYK just a calculation or is it more involved?

It depends.

At the simplest level, RGB->CMYK is:

	C' = 1-R
	M' = 1-G
	Y' = 1-B
	K = min(C',M',Y')
	C = C'-K
	M = M'-K
	Y = Y'-K

However, there are more complex implementations which use a profile
describing the actual colours of the inks; a common implementation
uses a matrix transformation. With such transformations, it's possible
that certain R/G/B colours (typically the "corners", where all
components are close to 0 or 1) cannot be represented as CMYK (i.e. 
you end up with C/M/Y values outside of the 0-1 range).

> Would it be useful for anything, or just a gimmick?

I don't think that it's really the job of r.what.color to perform such
translations. If you need CMYK, it's quite likely that you'll want to
use a specific colour profile, gamma correction etc.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>