I'm pleased to announce that development snapshot version 1.11.3 of LPROF is now available. This is the sixth development snapshot of the work that has been underway since LPROF became a SourceForge project. Please see the LPROF SourceForge home page at http://lprof.sourceforge.net/ for details.

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 snapshot appears to be stable it is a development release and as such it should not be considered 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.

Significant changes since the last development snapshot include:

1. LPROF now uses the ArgyllCMS spline regression code for creating camera and scanner profiles. Profiles created with the new regression code have both lower delta E numbers and smoother CLUT curves. Users have control of two parameters used by the regression algorithm to tune the resulting profiles. I would like to thank Gerhard Fuernkranz for integrating this into LPROF.

2. LPROF now uses the QT QSetting API to manage user and application settings. On Windows systems settings are now stored in the registry. On Mac OS/X QSettings uses the Carbon preferences API and on Unix/Linux/BSD systems the settings are stored in a text file in the $HOME/.lprof/config directory. Users who have been using previous 1.11.x snapshots will loose whatever settings had been stored in the old configuration file. As a result users will need to reinstall target reference files in LPROF.

3. LPROF now has expanded the the number of items that are actively tracked in the settings/configuration system to include configuration details of all profiles created in LPROF. This will allow users to open a profile that was created with LPROF and all settings in affect at the time the profile was created will automatically become the current settings in LPROF. This includes opening IT8.7 image files and the placing of corner marks on the IT8.7 image.

4. The charts for setting monitor gamma in the rough monitor profiler now work correctly on both little endian and big endian hardware. I would like to thank Oleksandr (Alex) Moskalenko for his assistance in getting the fixes tested for big endian hardware.

5. LPROF now uses VIGRA for all image file IO and has eliminated the need for TiffIO to handle tiff files. LPROF now supports the following image file formats:

"BMP" - Microsoft Windows bitmap image file. "GIF" - CompuServe graphics interchange format; 8-bit color. "JPEG" - Joint Photographic Experts Group JFIF format; compressed 24-bit color (only available if libjpeg is installed). "PNG" - Portable Network Graphic (only available if libpng is installed). "PNM" - Portable anymap.
"PPM" - Portable pixmap format (color). "SUN" - SUN Rasterfile.
"TIFF" - Tagged Image File Format. (only available if libtiff is installed.) "VIFF" - Khoros Visualization image file.

With 8, 16 or 32 bit integer or 32 or 64 bit floating point values per color channel if these higher bit depths are supported by the image file format. 8 and 16 bit integer and 32 bit floating point per channel image files have been tested and are working correctly. 32 bit integer and 64 bit floating point per channel images have not been tested at this time but should work. If anyone has the ability to test the untested formats please let the project team know your results.

6. Numerous other smaller bug fixes, enhancements and documentation improvements.

The development team has discovered that QT version 3.3.5 has a bug that will prevent LPROF or any application that uses custom QT widgets from building. This normally results in error messages about missing header files during the build process. The files incorrectly listed as missing are:

it8selector.h it8fileselector.h
iccprofileselector.h

Please see http://www.trolltech.com/developer/tasktracker.html?method=entry&id=85440 for more details about the bug and possible fixes. If you receive messages like this while building LPROF please verify your QT version before opening a bug report.

Please feel free to download, build, install and test this development snapshot. User feedback is very much appreciated and any reported problems will receive prompt attention from the LPROF development team. In addition, LPROF could use your help in other ways and we are looking for volunteers to handle various tasks. For example, the LPROF team would really like to have someone work on getting the Windows and/or Max OS/X SCons builds 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.

Hal V. Engel