Author Topic: The future of color separations  (Read 4955 times)

Offline DDSol

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Re: The future of color separations
« Reply #15 on: November 25, 2013, 04:59:40 PM »
:) I see you've been busy! Of course the Shaders... That's of course what I use. But they are nothing but a language to write in so it may run on a GPU. Shaders are also one of the 2 only ways to run compiled code on the client. V8 (Chrome's JavaScript engine) also does compilation to native machine code, but it needs to inject a lot of checking code to make sure everything is okay. This is due to the flexibility of JavaScript: Any variable can have any type of contents.

Note that OpenGL is owned by Khronos Group and isn't open source. It actually isn't source. It's an API, a set of rules of how to use a GPU, really. The implementation is where the source is at, and it's created mostly by 3D Card manufacturers, and for linux it's indeed open source. WebGL is just a shim that the browser puts between JavaScript and OpenGL so that JS can use OpenGL. This is again not open source, but just an API. Actually, none of the things you mentioned are open source. They are standards. Contracts of how to use components.

The language you use to write software in, whether C++, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript, GLSL (Shaders!), Pascal, etc, is mostly irrelevant. The thing is, you can write most anything in most any language. Of course, some languages run slower than others because of what system they run on (CPU vs GPU) or how many run-time checks they perform (JS, PHP) or whether it's compiled to machine code (C++, GLSL, Pascal, some JS) or not (PHP, some JS). So certain things care not possible to make in certain languages due to space-time constraints. (No room in memory for all the data you need, or the processing takes too long to be viable).

Open source has however enabled rapid development through re-use of components. But rapid development is nothing new. Libraries for all sorts of tasks have been around for decades.

Web 3.0 doesn't exist. Nobody knows what it means. Web 2.0 is vaguely defined at best and indicates something like the use of scripting and ajax-like interaction in the browser, enabling things like gmail. Web 3.0 is something people want to push saying we're making progress of some kind. But no one can agree on what Web 3.0 is, so it's really nothing.

Graphics 2.0 is an even vaguer concept than Web 3.0 and I can't figure out what it would mean.

As a last note on this I want to say that because it doesn't matter what language you use (to some extent, of course, if your stuff doesn't need too much memory or processing power), good software is not based on a clever use of libraries or platforms. It instead solves a problem at the conceptual level. The idea is what matters, not what language it is written on or what platform it runs on. As a matter of fact, many languages and platforms should provide the same solution with a way to exist in the real world.

The software I'm working on for instance has gone through 3 iterations with more or less the same engine/idea.

First I developed a CPU-only compiled app. I then decided to make the display faster by using the GPU, so OpenGL came into play. That worked very well and after seeing some of the Chrome WebGL examples, I realized I could run it straight into the browser. Nonetheless, none of these technologies has shaped or defined the engine itself. The engine is the secret sauce that provides 99% of the value of my sep system. The easy web access is a small bonus. But note that it doesn't matter how easy the access or use of something is, if it doesn't do well what it needs to do well then its value becomes negligible.

And vice versa, slapping a bunch of buzzwords onto a poorly working system and bolting on "the web" or "technologies" isn't going to improve the value.

So, I think the future of color separations isn't Web 2.0 or 3.0 or OpenGL, WebGL, JS, HTML5, etc, etc... , it's simply easier shirt printing and better looking shirts.

Ideas can never be super-rapidly developed. They are almost accidents. Ideas happen and cannot be forced into being. Ideas create solutions. Development only creates implementations of these solutions. The inventor is to the factory as the idea is to the development.


AdvancedArtist

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Re: The future of color separations
« Reply #16 on: November 25, 2013, 08:56:27 PM »
I love your detailed information Hans it is very educational. Yes some of the APIs, frameworks etc are not open source but allot of the glue is  ;D I love super glue in fact you can put allot things together really fast with open source super glue. A pinch of this a dash of that and whalaaa! But the shaders.. oh they are the dream machines of graphics and color and when you surround yourself with brilliant minds that hold PHDs in color science and who can also work with these things, well you know.

Web 3.0 is here now and I think I am going to be fortunate enough to repeat or I guess you could say threepeat.. I hit the dawn of web 2.0 the new era of video with AdvancedArtist.com which was replaced by AdvancedTshirts.com a training and APPs site for CorelDRAW. It is like being back in 1993 and I can see the future as plane as day...

Graphics 2.0 is the end of Adobe and Corel and many other applications as we know them. In less than 36 months a jr programmer will be able to write/scipt/glue togehter the equivalent of PhotoShop in less than a month. In less than 24 months we will be seeing things like 3D painting APPs that take us far beyond anything we as graphic artist ever thought possible.

Web 3.0 and Graphics 2.0 are just terms I use to describe the magnitude of change that is coming that will be beyond and faster than any level of change we have ever seen before in history.

In the last 25 to 35 years we have gone from rubylith, Staedtler pens and Exacto knives to yours and my apps and seps in seconds not hours.

Its only going to get better and better...
« Last Edit: November 25, 2013, 09:04:59 PM by AdvancedArtist »

Offline DDSol

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Re: The future of color separations
« Reply #17 on: November 25, 2013, 10:12:58 PM »
Hi Tom, the name is Han, actually.

I think that sep systems have a definite limit to how great they can be. There will always be a manual component. For instance, no sep program can decide on what the customer is willing to pay, thus how many colors you are willing to sep to. Also, art is very... um... artistic in nature. The beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and as such for there to be beauty, there must be an eye somewhere. Now, I don't think it'll be feasible to weld eyeballs into your PC...

Shaders, btw, are not magic color magicians. They're programs, nothing more, but specifically designed to run on a parallel architecture that is designed for and most commonly used for graphics processing. It is however also heavily used in scientific calculations. Shaders, as the name suggests, are 'meant to' do shading on 3D objects, but really can be used for any parallel processing task, and they often are.

Speaking of 3D... Blender is a current open source 3D modelling (not painting, alas) application. The future is now. Actually it's yesterday, but we're moving fast, so it's hard to keep up.

Adobe is moving to a "cloud" model with PhotoShop CC, but this only means you'll be paying per month instead of a one time purchase. Everything else will pretty much be the same. It certainly won't run in your browser any time soon.

I guess my main point is that the computing environment, with more processor cycles per second, and more megabytes per processor, is doing all the enabling here. Open source only works for common solutions. The idea is that a product can be made better and quicker due to it having many contributors. However, one needs many contributors for this to actually work.