Add Color Management to Hugin

[Yuv]

(Note: I'm also posting this to the Hugin gmail group)

I've been playing with RPP (http://www.raw-photo-processor.com/RPP/Overview.html) for RAW conversion preliminary to generating panoramas with Hugin (most recently Harry van der Wolf's OSX build of 2010.4.0-beta2); and running into problems with the color space.

RPP generates TIFF files in the BetaRGB color space; and using these files directly in Hugin I find two problems:

1) The panomatic control point generator barfs on these - Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT) in the crash logs ( I can provide details if you like). I can generate control points manually, or with autopano-sift; and the alignment and distortion optimization runs as expected.

2) The expoure optimization generally leads to absurd results; usually a strong horizontal exposure gradient, and if I try white balance optimization then the resulting panorama reminds my of my experiments in recreational pharmacology many decades ago.

I can work around this by converting the files from BetaRGB to ProPhoto (e.g. in Photoshop, that being what I'm most familiar with), after which Hugin handles them with no problems. But this is a pain when I have hundreds of images to deal with.

It's not clear if these are bugs or just a case of input that Hugin (or its components) weren't designed to handle; outside of RPP I haven't run across BetaRGB anywhere else. And I don't know the underlying math well enough to know whether adding support for this is a trivial fix or a major overhaul.

If this is a bug, I can provide lots of detail; if it's a missing feature, please consider this a feature request.

[Yuv (yuv)]

In a nutshell: Hugin does not manage color yet.

For panomatic, it is not a Hugin component. It's homepage is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/panomatic/ and you may want to file a bug report there.

I don't think color management is necessary for control point generation (as long as all input images share the same color space) but it surely does affect photometric / color adjustment and optimization.

[zarl (carl-einem)]

Could http://www.littlecms.com/ be useful to implement color management?

[Yuv (yuv)]

Yes, LittleCMS is what is used already in Enblend.

[tmodes (tmodes)]

The default branch contains now code for a color managed display of the images in the GUI.