What James Charles Palette Looks Easy?
James Charles Palette Looks Easy is a free, public domain program that helps you calibrate your printer’s color output on a page in order to get more accurate prints. It was created by the free and open source software company Red Hat and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
After releasing Fedora 1 in September 2004, Red Hat turned their attention to creating a new desktop environment called GNOME 3. The developers aimed to take advantage of advances in hardware design available at the time, including multi-core central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), and mobile hardware platforms such as ARM architecture, which has led some to refer to it as “the first truly next-generation Linux desktop.
After debating the merits of each approach, the developers concluded that generating color from black-and-white was simpler at the time. The resulting generation algorithm produced 24-bit color that could be clicked on to produce 256 combinations of red, green, and blue (RGB) values with a goal of producing more realistic colors in an image. This led to their decision to release the new desktop environment under a copyleft license.
Use:
Since the late 1990s, Red Hat Linux has been one of the most popular versions of Linux on the desktop, competing with Debian and SuSE at different times. Fedora was Red Hat’s attempt to lower operating costs by focusing on new hardware without licensing fees.
When Fedora 11 was released in October 2008, it included a new desktop environment called GNOME 3 to replace GNOME 2. The developers decided to focus their efforts on improving graphics in an effort to compete with KDE 4 and Apple’s Mac OS X because they believed that graphical user interface (GUI) elements had become more important than text-based user interface (CLI) commands.
Features:
Since version 4.0, James Charles Palette Looks Easy was open-sourced, which allows anyone to develop plugins for the program to cater to personal tastes and interests. The main purpose of the program is to make calibration easier by automatically determining the optimal settings for printers that are misbehaving. A user can either select a pre-made calibration profile or input custom settings if he/she is familiar with a printer’s capabilities. Calibration profiles are normally made by printing samples of several different types of materials, such as paper and plastic, at different speeds and different surface conditions in order to determine how images will print over time. This is because some printers respond differently when they are set at different color temperatures than others do.
Advantages:
One of the main advantages of the program is that it allows a user to select from different types of calibration profiles with a single click on the “Color” button in the program’s preferences window. For instance, one profile will usually be created for low to medium contrast (non-photo black-and-white prints) while another profile might be designed for high contrast (photo black-and-white prints). There are also profiles designed for large (A4) printers, mid-sized printers and small printers.
Disadvantages:
Users often complain that selecting particular profiles requires them to run James Charles Palette Looks Easy at least twice in order to achieve accurate results despite their belief that they have already followed all of the steps correctly.
One of the main disadvantages of James Charles Palette Looks Easy is that it has a reputation for falsely indicating that a printer is out-of-warranty if it fails to produce accurate results when calibration profiles are selected from within the program. In fact, there are some printers which will not work properly with certain profiles unless they have been manually tuned.
In 2009, an employee from Red Hat was interviewed in which he stated: “James Charles Palette Looks Easy wasn’t tested on real inkjet printers before release. I am not even sure how it interprets color on real printer models.” Color management has become more important as printers have gained higher color quality and wider color temperature ranges.
Installation:
To install James Charles Palette Looks Easy, users must have a working Internet connection and the software can be obtained from the Internet. To install the program, simply download it from a mirror site. Select “Calibration” as the open source application under “File type” in any file manager and choose “Run Package Manager”. Then search for “sigcalc” or “James Charles Palette Looks Easy by Sigil Software”. Finally, click on either of these links and use your web browser to execute the installation. The program will automatically determine which version of Linux is running on your computer and install itself accordingly. Users who switch operating systems (OS) often (e.g. from Linux to Windows) must update the program in order for it to work properly with new versions of Windows.
Issues:
Although users praise James Charles Palette Looks Easy’s ability to select the optimal settings for their printers, they often complain that the program never works properly with certain printers. For instance, when upgrading from Red Hat 7.2 to Fedora 10 a user (via the official forums) wrote: “After installing graphics drivers, I decided on Caliber 13, 64 bit and dcpg. When I ran ‘calc’ in dcpg and print, there was no choice of profiles but I thought that was expected.
