Key features
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Key features

The most important features chalk currently has to offer, are:

Color management

One of the most distinguishing features in chalk is its color management. If you put two screens side to side, you will notice that there is often a lot of difference in the way they display colors. Even white, especially white, is often not the same thing at all. On one screen it can be a dirty yellow, on another screen a sickly bluish. Very seldom is it a creamy milk-white. The same holds, unfortunately, for scanners, printers and digital cameras. So, if you want to see the right colors on screen and on paper, being the colors that you saw when taking your snapshot, you will have to compensate.

chalk can do this for you: in chalk, a color is (almost) never just a set of numbers, one for each color channel; it is a set of numbers with information attached. And that extra information is contained in a profile: your image has a profile, your scanner has a profile, your camera should have a profile and your screen has a profile. When passing information from your image to your screen, the profiles are checked and the correct color is computed. This may cause a little slowness, now and then, but the result is that you can work with colors, instead of almost meaningless RGB triplets.

Available colorspaces are: 8 bit/channel RGB, CMYK, grayscale and wet watercolors, 16 bit/channel RGB, CMYK, grayscale and L*a*b*, “half” RGB, and 32 bit float RGB (HDR) and LMS.

Image formats

chalk currently supports the following image formats, both for importing and exporting, apart from its own: PNG, TIFF, JPEG, Dicom, XCF, PSD, GIF, BMP, XPM, Targa, RGB, and OpenEXR. Additionally, chalk can import ICO files. PSD (the Photoshop file format) is only supported up to version 6, from version 7 on, the Photoshop file format is closed.

Embedded icc profiles and exif information are preserved on export to supporting file formats. chalk's native file format stores icc and exif information.

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