Page 2 - The Color Space | Widen

You can have my last roll of Kodachrome, Paul Simon.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009 by Mark Pajari

The recent announcement that Kodak will no longer manufacture the once-popular Kodachrome film has a lot of film purists hanging their heads. Not that everyone didn't see this coming. Digital cameras have outsold film cameras beginning in 1994. Today, you will have to look real hard to find any film cameras on the shelves of most stores. They may be slightly easier to find at camera stores that cater to professionals such as B&H or Calumet, but try to find a film camera at Best Buy or Target. They are over there, next to the bulky tube TVs and VCRs. History will show that the first decade of this millennium was when digital went from just a cool technology to the accepted standard in image capture. Although digital photography has been in use commercially for over 20 years, the last ten years have seen incredible advances, both in terms of function and quality. Photo journalists were first to adopt, followed by studios, and then consumers. There will always be those that believe film is superior to digital. And for certain situations like fine art, it may be true. It's the same reason some people prefer the natural sound of vinyl records over CDs or MP3s. Truth be told, there is a certain look of film like Kodachrome that can be difficult to duplicate with digital photography. Although with the right post processing in Photoshop you can come close. To me, Film vs. digital is like learning how to do long division with a pencil on paper (film) instead of simply using a calculator (digital). You can arrive at the same number with both methods, but one requires a lot more work.

As for me, I love digital photography and am not looking back, even for a second. The concept of immediately seeing how your shot turned out has alone made the transition to digital worth it. Then there is the fact that you can shoot a seemingly unlimited number of shots, trying different exposures, techniques, poses, etc. without having to worry about how much film you have left. And let's not forget that if you provide color retouching or premedia services, you have eliminated a number of color reproduction variables from your process. With digital photography there is no film processing and scanning. Two steps that can drastically alter the color before it even makes it on to your computer display. I know, because I used to scan plenty of Kodachrome transparencies with all their vibrant hues back in the day of the drum scanner.

Okay, so the points I just made in the film vs. digital debate have all been made many times before. And now that Paul Simon's mama took his Kodachrome away, (as made famous in his song of the same name, where he sings, "Mama don't take my Kodachrome away..."), it got me thinking as to other recording artists and the doomed technology they didn't want to do without...

In 1984, Phil Collins sang, "Daddy, you better not take my top-loading Sony Betamax VCR away..."
In 1980, Ted Nugent sang, "I'll take my bow and arrow to anyone that touches my yellow Panasonic 8 Track tape player..."
In 1995, Pearl Jam sang, "I'll sit here at this Scitex Prisma workstation 'till the day I die."
In 2000, Harry Connick, Jr. jazzed up his fans by crooning, "I'm a dot matrix man, and I always will be..."
In 1991, Enya sang, "Sail away, sail away, sail away with my Sony Walkman...."
In 1927, Louis Armstrong blasted away at his trumpet while singing, "Hey boys, don't you take my wax cylinder phonograph player off that shelf...!"
In the 1998, song, "Dial Me Up that Crazy Internet", Weird Al Yankovic sang, "You'll get my 28K baud modem when you pry it from my cold, dead hand."
In 2008, Snow Patrol sang, "Crack the shutters so I can gaze out at my beautiful Kodak Approval XP4 dye sublimation direct digital color proofer..."
In 2009, U2's Bono lamented, "Baby, you and my Toshiba HD DVD will never leave my side. You're both magnificent..."

So you see, many recording artists aren't so cutting edge after all. You can still have my Kodachrome, Paul Simon... And tell Art Garfunkel he can have my Ektachrome too.

Persistence of Pink

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Yesterday I posted a blog about the importance of reducing clutter and maintaining a neutral surrounding color when evaluating color proofs. I linked to a website sporting some great optical illusions that nicely illustrated how surrounding colors influenced human color perception.

Staying on that same theme, today I want to add one more cool optical illusion that involves a little color theory and a phenomenon called persistence of vision and after image. After image is the ghost image that seems to float in front of your eyes often after looking at something very bright like a light bulb or Stephen Hawking. Persistence of vision relies on this afterimage to persist on the retina for around 1/25 of a second. Persistence of vision is what puts the motion in some flashing neon signs and marquee signs with chasing lights. Time Square or the Las Vegas Strip is one giant persistence of vision experience. This is also what gives the illusion of motion in a film created from a series of still frames This moving picture phenomenon can be blamed for giving us such cinematic masterpieces like "From Justin to Kelly", "Kazaam", "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!", "Howard the Duck", and any movie staring Pauly Shore.

Okay, so here is the illusion. Stare at the small black cross on the center of the image below. You will see that one magenta dot will disappear from each position around the circle very quickly. As this cycles around, it will appear as a green dot is now moving around the circle. That is the afterimage of the magenta dot - green is the opposite color of magenta. As you keep your eyes fixed on the black cross a little longer, you will actually see the green dot erase all of the magenta dots, so all you see is a chasing green dot. It's kind of like when Pac Man eats all the dots as he races around the screen. Here, when the green afterimage is combined with the magenta dot, a gray dot is produced which is the exact same color of the background.

Keep your eyes very still as you stare at the black cross. First you will see a chasing green dot appear (the opposite color from magenta on the color wheel). Then in about 15 to 20 seconds, the "green" dot will erase the magenta dots. Cool, huh?

The Youtube video above shows a great application of the persistence of vision phenomenon. One can only imagine the different mobile marketing opportunities that this product might have in places like Las Vegas, New York, or any other place people are gathered after dark.

Surround yourself with color. As long as it's gray!

Tuesday, June 16, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Pink is not the new black. Black is the new black. I love good black and white photography. And a nice neutral gray goes with just about anything.

But I also love to put rich color on walls. I love the warm, golden amber-red colors of sunsets, and cool, crisp deep hues of lush green forests. I like teal. Teal is like a blue that wanted to be green, but it stopped halfway there. Probably because it heard Kermit the Frog sing, "It's not easy being green." .

Color is personal. It's an important thing to surround yourself with the colors that make you feel good. Except when looking at color. And by color, I mean color proofs, prints, samples, swatches, etc...

If you have a job that requires you to make critical color judgments, such as comparing proofs to a product sample, press sheet or color swatches, or simply choosing a color from a swatchbook, then you should have a dedicated area without other colors to distract your eye. The surfaces of that area can be made up of any color you want, as long as it's neutral gray.

Last year, I posted a blog on the importance of viewing conditions, specifically pertaining to the color temperature of the light used to view color (see Color Communication 101 from July 9, 2008). The surrounding environment you view color in is just as important as the color of the light used to view color.

The international standard ISO 3664:1974, Viewing Conditions - Prints, transparencies and substrates for graphic arts technology and photography, specifies characteristics of how color should be viewed. Among the points this standard makes is:

Bright colors on furniture or clothing should be avoided as they will cause a color cast
All surfaces surrounding the viewing area should be neutral gray in color with a reflectance of 60% or less (Munsell N8)

You can add that the viewing area should be clear of clutter. Any other colors in your field of view will impact how you view color.

Where do you view color? Okay, okay, I'll come clean. I did open up a big-old can of artistic license to the image you see here on the left. I added a few items to the light booth for illustration purposes. But I have been places that do not look too far from that. The more colors you see around the color that counts, the larger your room for error is. Color reproduction is difficult enough without all the other colors influencing your decisions. Do yourself a favor and cut the clutter.

There is a great website that is filled with amazing optical illusions. It has some great interactive exercises that really prove the point that surrounding color plays an important role in your color perception. Specifically check out the illusions called Color Perception and Color Perception2. There is also some other fun illusions that you may have seen before.

It seems impossible that the blue squares on top of the cube to the left are the same color as the yellow squares on the cube to the right. But closer inspection reveals that the squares from both images are in fact gray - equal values of red, green, and blue.

Another common illusion that seems hard to believe... Square A and square B are actually the same value of gray. They are identical, but our brain tells us this can't be true because of the placement of the squares and the surrounding colors. This illustration also proves that you should never evaluate color next to a giant green cylinder. Check out these and other interactive optical illusions.

When viewing color and making critical color decisions, it is important for the success of your project to keep the viewing area neutral and clear. And only wear gray clothes that comply with ISO 3644:1974 - Munsell N8... Okay, you don't have to necessarily be that meticulous . But keep in mind if you are looking at color proofs while wearing a shirt with bright red sleeves, it can influence your color perception. And while you're at it, take off those rose-colored glasses.

Pulp Fiction: Is Print Dead?

Thursday, June 11, 2009 by Mark Pajari

This week at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced the next version of the iPhone: The iPhone 3GS. During the event, Josh Koppel from Scroll Motion came up on stage to talk about their Iceberg Reader. They currently offer 500 books and will soon offer 50 magazines, 120 newspapers, and over one million book titles available for the iPhone.

On May 5th, Amazon introduced the Kindle DX - a thin, tablet device sporting a 9.7 inch e-ink paper display with 16 shades of gray. Many textbooks will be available for education, and they have announced pilot programs with major newspapers like The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. They already have over 275,000 books available on amazon.com. Amazon also recently purchased Lexcycle, makers of the popular Stanza e-reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

So the question is: Are we ready to replace certain forms of traditional ink on paper with these digital readers as a means of getting our news, education, and entertainment gossip? I mean will the fact that Jon and Kate (from Jon and Kate plus 8) are having marital problems be any less riveting at 72 pixels per inch vs. 150 dots per inch?

Three iPhone digital reader applications (from left): ScrollMotion's Iceberg Reader , Classics, and Amazon's Stanza. All available at Apple's App Store. Note how traditional book shelves and page turning are simulated in these e-readers.

I recall going to the Seybold Seminars in Boston and New York in the late 90s and experiencing all the emerging vendors of e-readers and e-books. They even had an e-books pavilion on the exhibit floor. If you bought into their sales pitch 10 years ago, by now we should have a digital reader on every desk in every school, everybody would download the latest best seller to their eBook, and all the newspapers would be carried around as a bunch of ones and zeros in a handy digital device vs. a bunch of CMYK ink drops pressed onto the fibers from a dead tree.

10 years ago you would be reading these words on some printed newsletter that Widen may have sent you via snail mail. Instead, you are reading this on a computer display via a blog on our Website. Unless you saw fit to print out a hard copy for your viewing pleasure. In which case it still fits into the distribute and print model compared with the print and distribute model. Either way, the times are changing.

Is Print Dead?
So is print dead? Hardly. Along with new technologies or special interests, comes a half dozen new magazine titles on them. Printed packaging will always be needed to hold products. And any cataloger will tell you that while they may maintain a dynamic Web presence for their e-commerce efforts, it is still the printed catalog that often drives much of the traffic to their websites. Print is still the ultimate push medium while the Internet is primarily a pull medium for now. Some newspapers have folded and others will continue to struggle as subscribers fall and costs rise. More and more people get all their news, sports and weather from the Internet because of its timely and dynamic content. You can't watch video highlights of the baseball game that just ended an hour ago in a newspaper any more than you can check the radar on the back page of section A of USA Today. Actually, I think it would be pretty funny if a newspaper published radar images on the weather page - "Uh, yea, that line of storms came through, like, 16 hours ago. And how do I get the image to loop?" Maybe they could do a different frame of the radar animation in the bottom corner of every page and it would appear to move as you flipped the pages just like those little flip animation books. But I digress...

In order to get the average book lover to but down their paperback and pick up an e-book, these devices try to emulate the traditional paperback experience. The covers of the digital books are displayed on a digital book shelf. The digital pages are animated as the e-reader flips the page to the left. A sound of a page turning can be heard. There is a digital bookmark available to hold your place. I'm sure there are companies investing R&D money into designing a way of adding the smell of ink and paper to an e-book or providing the occasional paper cut as digital pages are turned. Simulating the analog is often how we transition to the digital. It makes for more converts.

Amazon's Kindle DX e-book tablet sports a large 9.7-inch e-ink paper display with 16 shades of gray, making it ideal for newspapers, magazines, and graphic-rich textbooks.

Paper or Plastic?

Then there is the whole green movement that printers are facing. Actually, many printers are some of the biggest recyclers around. At Quad/Graphics, 98.6 percent of all solid waste that left their printing plants in 2007 went into a recycling stream. Their goal is to become 100 percent landfill-free. And let's not forget the printers of grocery bags. It used to be that they asked you if you wanted paper or plastic at the checkout lane. Now if you ask for either, you are given the evil eye by the tree-hugging checkout kid with the 12 nose rings. You are now expected to buy your own canvas bags and bring them to the grocery store each time. Instead of buying my own grocery bags, I am just going to buy some really big pants with huge pockets and carry my groceries home that way. Spacious pockets for Hot Pockets.... Okay, I'm officially sliding off topic now.

Is print dying a very slow death? Maybe. My crystal ball is in the shop, so I can't say for sure. I do think certain segments of print will be gone or certainly much smaller in a generation or so. I know people that could never read a book or magazine on a digital device. These are the same folks that were raised on the World Book Encyclopedias, the Sunday paper (with a bagel and coffee), and Eddie Bauer catalogs. But their place on this earth will gradually be replaced by the generation that grew up on the Wii, Xbox, and Landsend.com. And those people are right at home in front of light-emitting pixels.

A Multitude of Media Methods
Today's marketing professionals have many choices of media to get their message out. Traditional electronic methods of TV and radio now find themselves rubbing elbows with Websites sporting RSS feeds and streaming video, text messaging, LED billboards, blogs and podcasts to name just a few. And let's not forget the exploding social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Will the high school graduating class of 2020 have any desire to publish a printed yearbook?

For now, traditional ink-on-paper is alive and well. I am reminded of that fact every year from September - December as I begin taking scores of catalogs out of my mailbox each day. Some people hate junk mail. I like it. Because I know somewhere it is keeping a designer designing, a photographer shooting, a prepress or premedia service provider providing prepress services, a printer printing, a digital asset management solutions provider providing digital asset solutions, and a mail carrier investing in chiropractic services. Of course e-commerce and cross media publishing keeps most of those people busy too. But you get the idea.

Print is portable, never needs to be restarted, never needs batteries or recharging, and is easily viewed in bright sunlight. Print keeps the economy moving.

At least for now.

PIA Color Management Conference: Take 7

Monday, April 13, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Stephen Johnson Keynote: Photography and Realism

Internationally recognized digital photography pioneer, designer, author, and teacher, Stephen Johnson spoke during one of the keynote sessions at the recent 10th annual PIA Color Management Conference in Phoenix. His photography explores the concerns of a landscape artist working in an increasingly industrialized world. His international teaching has led him to England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Sweden and Mexico, and on two voyages to Antarctica. Johnson's photographs have been exhibited, published and collected in Europe, the US and Japan. In 1999, Folio Magazine declared the publication of Johnson's digital photographs in Life Magazine to be one of the Top 15 Critical Events in magazine publishing in the twentieth century. He is arguably the Ansel Adams of our time.

The underlying theme to Johnson's presentation was that the whole advent of digital photography represents a whole new level of the ability to record reality.

Photography Aids Conservation Movement
Johnson said that early photographs were instrumental in the development of the national park system. "There is a long tradition of photography in the environment. And the reason that relates to me for color management is because ultimately these places are wondrous almost beyond belief. And we've had lots of different ways of looking at them over the years in various states of unreality." Johnson said. "There is a greater power now to portray them for what they are, both in their beauty, their nuance, their subtlety, and their wonder. And along those lines, I've spent a great deal of my adult life." he added.

Writing With Light
"Photography means writing with light. It is in fact a depiction of what was before the lens. It has nothing inherently to do with pushing pixels around after the fact. You do not fix a photograph in Photoshop, you make a photograph in the camera. You try and process the photograph into something use able in Photoshop." Johnson stated. "Very rarely do you take a lousy photograph and make it interesting in Photoshop. More often you end up wasting a lot of time, and may end up with something that is even uglier than what you started with." he added.

Johnson said that the photograph is made at the moment of inspiration. He emphasized that photography is a sort of enchantment that you then distill. He said that it is a fascination with a place, a moment, a passing of events where you are trying to distill it down to a two dimensional representation that can be fit into the color or dynamic range capabilities of the camera. He referenced photography to what Van Gogh said about his own work - That his job was to exaggerate the essential and leave the obvious vague. "That's where photography rises from document to artwork." Johnson said.

"I don't believe that photography talent has anything to do with manipulating media. I still believe that despite this ability in the digital age to manipulate images into being almost anything other than what they were, the fundamental power of photography is the fact that we believe it." Johnson said.

Johnson displayed a number of examples showing how photography has been messed with for a long time in lots of different ways...

Examples of photographic manipulation: A famous Civil War photo depicting a Gettysburg battlefield scene (left) by Alexander Gardner is controversial because some claim that he actually went into the scene and moved the body of a dead soldier around to get a better photo. A more current photograph (right) published by the Weekly World News shows President Clinton shaking hands with an alien. This photo manipulation helped sell a lot of t-shirts and other memorabilia. Or is it real, and this explains a lot about the Clinton Presidency? Hmmm...

Hyper Color Photography
Johnson spoke about the current state of color photography in landscape, "...The contemporary stylistic choices are one of exaggeration, heavy contrast and a world bathed in the perpetual golden light of eternal sunset. Of deep saturation... where we get this sense of hyper, intensified reality. It was bad enough before Photoshop. Boy is it bad now!" Johnson said. "It's gotten to the point where hyperbole is the medium and there seems to be an irresistible relationship between the hand and the saturation slider in Photoshop that just can't resist being pulled over to the right." he added.

Johnson asked the question, "What does the world look like to your eyes? Does it look like this hyped up reality? Is the world that we are capturing somehow lacking, so that it needs enhancing? To enhance a photograph, by definition, it seems to me to be talking about a bad photograph, a boring place or an untalented photographer." Johnson said.

"When we get to the idea of photography and reality, it's gotten to the point that photographic views of the world are so pervasive, that we expect the world to look like the photographs." Johnson said. To prove his point he told the story about an experience he had at the edge of the Grand Canyon on a hazy day... He was watching people get out of a tour bus, walk up to the edge of the canyon, look out over the hazy scene and say, "It sure doesn't look like the postcards" as they turned around and left. "Their preconceptions had been so skewed by these photographic exaggerations, that they weren't even willing to consider looking at the real place. That says a great deal on how photography has influenced our perceptions." Johnson said.

"It's called fog..." was Johnson's response one day when asked by an art director what went wrong with this seemingly washed-out photo of Misty Lake at Arcadia National Park in Maine. This example underscores his approach to photography and realism.

He asked if shadows are, in fact, black. He said that if you look at any magazine, you will see plenty of black shadows, yet if you walk outside, black is not the overriding feeling that you get. "Photography has grown into a harsh, dark, somber view of the planet earth.... The world is a troubling place, but it is also a delightful place. A place filled with light, not filled with darkness. Your photographs don't have to reflect that." Johnson said.

The Digital Epiphany
Johnson moved on by discussing the difference between film and digital sensors, and the day film died for him in 1994. "It was a brutal and ugly death." Johnson confided.

The enlargement above of a San Francisco street scene taken in 1994 shows why Steve Johnson realized that film was going away. The top image shows detail from 4x5 E100 transparency film scanned with a Linotype Tango drum scanner. The bottom image is the same detail from a prototype BetterLight digital camera back. He said that was the point he knew film was dead as he looked at the difference between the two images.

Johnson discussed how with digital, we can shoot RAW and balance on something known to be gray and get some degree of accuracy in the original color reproduction.

He then reviewed many different photos from his years of work within the US National Park system.

"Maybe it's time to get out of the way and let the beauty we see, be the beauty we try and record. Real light and color from the most ordinary scene can have an intrinsic beauty. I continue to be amazed at the narrow vision, the blinders that so many people have on, as they walk around the world and don't notice things. Even photographers, who have the audacity to characterize the planet earth bathed in the sun's light as sometimes being "bad light". They have to wait around for the "good light". What a huge opportunity missed..." Johnson said. "Being a witness to wonder is what photography is about." he added.

Johnson concluded by reminding the audience that there is a ways to go. "We are not in an age of digital photography. We are in an age of electronic photography that we are digitizing. The Bayer pattern itself is an early-on in the process technology. We need to be able to color manage our cameras - having a spectrophotometer in the cameras, understanding the sensors color capabilities and starting to move toward image specific profiles is where we need to go with digital cameras." Johnson said.

PIA Color Management Conference: Take 6

Friday, April 3, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Color Management: 10 Years Back and 10 Years Forward - How Times Have Changed: Part 3

This session at The PIA Color Management Conference featured three industry experts who took the audience back in time and then took a peek into the future of color management technology. I will cover each speaker's presentation in a separate blog post. This post covers Dan Caldwell's presentation.

Dan Caldwell
Dan Caldwell is the president of operations at ICS (Integrated Color Solutions, Inc.) Dan was one of the brains behind ColorBlind software form the late 90s and he is now producing cutting edge solutions at ICS, like Remote Director (soft proofing software). Dan spoke to the future of color management.

Still Too Complex
Dan began by saying that color management is still too complex. In order to make it easier for everyone to use, color management needs to:

Move into the subsystems
- That's starting to happen, but it's not there yet
It needs to become transparent
- So that we are using it but we don't know we're using it
All devices need to be self calibrating
All software needs to call on those calibrations

Dan got a chuckle from the audience when he said all the above points were pulled from a ColorBlind presentation from 1999. Meaning that we are still facing some of the same issues as we did 10 years ago. "We've made some strides here, but this is still a valid list of where we need to go in the future." Dan said.

The future of color management will involve the displays becoming much more important. Remote proofing and collaboration is becoming a bigger part of our workflow."Soft proofing will become much more accepted." Dan said.

We will see more and more large gamut displays. The color and luminance consistency is better and the resolution is getting higher.

We need automated verification of ICC profiles, the CMMs, workflows and documents. Systems need to verify that they are color accurate, you can't just assume they are accurate. Dan pointed to Maxwell from Chromix as one tool that is providing this feature.

Dan wrapped up by predicting where we will be in 2018:

All ICC profiles will be spectral based
All applications will assign color handling automatically
All systems will call on color management by default
Monitors will handle ALL proofing
Microsoft will introduce a working color management solution (laughter)

Mark

PIA Color Management Conference: Take 5

Thursday, April 2, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Color Management: 10 Years Back and 10 Years Forward - How Times Have Changed: Part 2

This session at The PIA Color Management Conference featured three industry experts who took the audience back in time and then took a peek into the future of color management technology. I will cover each speaker's presentation in a seperate blog post. This post covers Steve Upton's presentation.

Steve Upton
Steve Upton is the president of Chromix, maker of tools like ColorThink - something which is in the arsenal of any true color geek. He is a popular speaker at trade shows and conferences. See my previous blog post on his excellent article called "The Color of Toast" which explains color managment technology in everyday language.

Although Steve was charged with speaking about the current state of color management, he confessed that he spends a lot of time looking forward in the color management world, and looking at it optimistically. "I think it will all be wonderful, but hopefully not too wonderful. Over the years, if there is one thing I've learned, it's go where there's chaos.... If everything works perfectly, there's no work for any of us in this room." Steve said.

Current Developments in Color Mangement
There are some interesting things happening today that are worth watching, yet they have some challenges that surround them...

• Integrated Measurement
Building a good ICC profile doesn't solve color management. Keeping a single device calibrated doesn't solve color management. Some new printers have full-blown spectrophotometers on board and the potential to support other types of media other than the one the manufacturer wants you to use. "Integrated measurements is a good idea. And for those machines that have them, it appears to be working quite well." Steve said.

But Steve did caution that it also presents an interesting challenge. He told a story of a large creative agency in New York that had an HP and Veris printer, both with integrated measurement, and and Epson with a conventional prepress RIP in front of it. All of the printers were in the same room, but could they not get them to match each other. The printers all did there own stuff internally. "It's not the be all, end all, but there are benefits." Steve said.

"Hopefully over time we will see more and more consistency between the different technologies that are offered, so that more of these systems will match more automatically" Steve said.

• Cheap Instruments
The EyeOne Pro is a good low cost spectrophotometer and you can get good quality screen calibrators for $150 to $200 with decent software. "But a whole bunch of cheap instruments out there doesn't mean that everything is going to get better." Steve said.

• Large Gamut Displays
"These new flat panel displays are blasting light at us in incredible volumes. Which by comparison make your prints look too dark. But the printer is not the problem. The displays are way too bright [before you calibrate them]." Steve said. But he did add that it can be a good thing, because it means you can bring the light around you up more. "You don't have to work in the caves anymore" he added.

The backlight in flat screen technology is changing. Were moving from florescent tube to white LED. And beyond that, are three color LEDs so now you can balance RGB (white point). But there can be uniformity problems.

"When you graph these new large gamut displays in 3D, you see that there are colors you can get on press (like cyans available in SWOP), that now can be viewed on these displays. So it's another step to making soft proofing more reliable. We will see a lot of advancements in display technology in the next ten years." Steve said.

• Display Port
Apple's new Display Port technology is like USB for displays. There is the potential to hook up more than one display to a single port and the potential to do high bit depth through it.

• SWOP GRACoL specifications
New specifications like SWOP3, SWOP5, GRACoL, G7 have created a new set of reference data. Up until now with Photoshop we had one profile for US use: SWOPV2. We now have a unified way of doing things. "It's a renaissance in US printing for standards." Steve concluded.

Mark

PIA Color Management Conference: Take 4

Thursday, April 2, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Color Management: 10 Years Back and 10 Years Forward - How Times Have Changed: Part 1

This session at The PIA Color Management Conference featured three industry experts who took the audience back in time and then took a peek into the future of color management technology. I will cover each speaker's presentation in a seperate blog post. First up is Dave Hunter...

Dave Hunter
Dave Hunter, President of Pilot Marketing and one of the founders of the conference, discussed the previous 10 years and reflected back on how things have changed since the conference's inception in 1999.

Dave began by talking about what he referred to as the "bleeding edge technology" of color management. "Bleeding edge technology means that the technology doesn't always work, and when it doesn't, you get cut. And depending on how bad it doesn't work, you bleed. And sometimes you bleed a lot. If I knew then, what I know now, I wouldn't be up in front of you talking today. Because I've lived through a lot of bleeding edge technology." Dave said.

Proprietary Systems
Looking back 10 years, Dave said that initially it was a very proprietary color world. Prepress color management systems only interacted with themselves, not other systems. The formation of the ICC in 1993 gave the industry an open platform so companies like Aldus, Adobe, Quark along with different RIPs could share the same profiles.

"Remember Pagemaker?" Dave asked while he talked about some of his early experience with color management when he was with Aldus. He would attend summit meetings with top software manufacturers (Agfa, Apple, Adobe...) to work through color problems. Dave said he learned a lot in those early days by writing down notes and listening to the conversations.

Dave discussed the state of the art in profiling in 1992. "At Kodak's labs in Bedford, MA, the hand held spectrophotometer took two of us to carry across the room, and costed around $15,000. "There were three of us that would take turns reading a 1,000 patch output target, one patch at a time. It would take approximately six hours to do. And to process this profile, would take about eight to ten hours." Dave said. He added that the state-of-the-art Mac IIci that was used would crash about half of the time. "An output profile would literally take 16 hours to make." Dave said.

The Holy Grail
Dave continued his stroll down memory lane by reminding the audience when color management was sold as the Holy Grail. Color management was oversold as something that will take bad images and make them good or "Child's Play" as Lino Color used to say. Or "Perfect color with your eyes closed." as ColorBlind claimed. "It never met expectations, and it was getting a pretty bad reputation because it was this never-ending promise that was never fulfilled." Dave said.

Anyone Remember this claim? "Perfect color with your eyes closed." Really?

Apple Trouble
Dave spoke about the turmoil at Apple in 1996 - 1997. In 1997 Apple considered dropping ColorSync until they figured out that it was unique and catered to it's core users: graphic arts and printing. Since then they have put a lot of resources into ColorSync and it helped save Apple as a company.

Some of the companies from 1998 that were making software or hardware for color management: Color Savvy, Logo, RIT80, Praxisoft, ColorBlind, Fuji, LightSource, Monaco, Optical, Heidelberg, GretagMacbeth, Techkon, Sequel Imaging. "Many of these companies are not around anymore." Dave said. He also referred to what he called the 2008 X-Rite Empire. LightSource, Monaco, GretagMacbeth, Sequel, Logo and Pantone are now all part of X-Rite. And although X-Rite bought out GretagMacbeth, Dave pointed out that more of the recent product releases have been GretagMacbeth products.

Enabling Technologies
Dave expanded on some of the enabling technologies to color management throughout the last ten years:

LightSource Colortron 1997 - 2001
- First hand held sub $5000 spectrophotometer ($1500)
- Used software on a computer for intelligence
ColorBlind software 1997 - 2000
- First to use 3D modeling so you could see what was happening with gamuts
Standards Committees
- Dave McDowell, Larry Warter, Mike Rodriguez, Larry Steele worked tirelessly to provide the framework that enabled all of this color management technology. "These guys don't get enough credit. Because without them, this industry would really be in disarray." Dave said.

Education is Key
Dave wrapped up by emphasizing that education has always been an issue and it is still lacking. "I liken the analogy of color to an onion. Just when you think you know it all, there is another layer. And I'm still peeling back these layers of the onion because there's so much to it. And still crying along the way" he joikingly added.

Mark

Out of Gamut 3

Monday, March 30, 2009 by Mark Pajari

The latest "Out of Gamut" cartoon...

Assigning, tagging, converting, and embedding ICC profiles in Photoshop

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Fun with ICC Profiles... Okay, "fun" is a relative term...

The question I'm asked most often is, "Do these socks make me look fat?" Another question that I'm often asked, but is not nearly as weird is, "What's the difference between assigning, tagging, converting and embedding an ICC profile in Photoshop?"

I'm glad you asked. Here is the answer....

Assigning a Profile
When you assign a profile in Photoshop, you are telling the program the meaning of the RGB or CMYK values. For example, you are telling Photoshop what specific shade of blue is represented by 46R 169G 232B. When you assign a profile, you do not change any RGB or CMYK values in the file, only the way in which those values are rendered to your display within Photoshop. To say it another way, you are changing the appearance of those values, not the values themselves. When you use the Assign Profile function in Photoshop (found under Edit) you can also remove a tagged profile by selecting Don't Color Manage This Document.

Tagging
Tagging a file with an ICC profile is pretty much the same thing as Assigning a profile. Many people use the terms Assigning and Tagging interchangeably.

Converting
Converting lets you convert a file from it's profile space (or if the image is untagged, the current working space) to any other profiled color space. Here, the goal is to change the RGB values, not necessarily the color appearance. Typically a Convert to Profile function (also found under Edit) is used to convert a file from RGB to CMYK. The dialog box displays the source profile and allows you to select the destination profile along with other options like the rendering intent. Using Convert to Profile is always a better way to convert a file to CMYK because it gives you much more control than simply selecting Image - Mode - CMYK.

The Convert to Profile dialog box in Photoshop is used to convert an image from one color space to another using ICC profiles.

Embedding

When you embed a profile, it simply means that you are including that profile in the file when you save it. You are including a little meta data with the file that conveys your color intentions to everyone downstream in the workflow. It is for this reason that it is generally a good idea to embed ICC profiles in every image.

There are a few exceptions to embedding profiles. One instance is in a more closed-loop CMYK workflow. If all your images are destined for a standard press condition, you know that no one will be opening or editing your files any further, and you have converted all the files for that press condition (SWOP3 for example), then in a sense you have already tagged the file with the appropriate profile when you did the RGB-CMYK conversion.

Or suppose you are sending out a bunch of RGB images for a Web site. Microsoft Internet Explorer doesn't recognize ICC profiles (Safari and FireFox do), although Windows Vista does treat untagged images as sRGB. Embedding profiles also increases the file size to a degree, which is not a good thing when you want fast-loading images on a Web page. For now, it's best to just convert Web images to sRGB and call it good.

And no, those socks don't make you look fat.

What Can Red Do for You?

Friday, February 27, 2009 by Mark Pajari

DAM = Digital Alligator Management

Let's say you build a big red barn. It's huge. Like the size of the Superdome. And instead of cows, you fill that barn up with alligators. Big ones. With big teeth. They are all over the place, just running free. Now, it is your job to maintain that barn. In addition to knowing the ins and outs of barn maintenance, don't you think you should know something about how to handle all those alligators inside so you don't lose a limb each time you go inside? You should know how to organize them in cages, how to feed them, care for them if they get sick, and how to handle them with the proper equipment. You need to know how to speak their language. Hey, alligators just need a little love.

That scenario is a little like some digital asset management companies that want to sell you some off the shelf software (the barn), but they really don't have any experience with the assets (the alligators) that are contained in their systems.

UPS says "What can BROWN do for you?" To play off that theme, I'll ask, "What can RED do for you?" (Widen's logo is red. But you knew that already.) So what can Widen do for you? Well, to put it simply... We know all about alligators. We've been raising alligators for over 60 years. Okay, enough about alligators already.

What can RED do for you?

What should your digital asset management provider know? They should know about your digital assets. They should be experts in digital photography and photo composition. They should be intimate with color management and color conversion methods. They should know how to construct a solution that is built with assets that can be repurposed for different media. They should live with Photoshop jockeys that know all about color retouching and image manipulation. They should have intimate knowledge of rich media and video asset management. They should possess a broad range of prepress and premedia services. They should breathe digital asset optimization. They should live digital asset workflow management. They should be all about catalog production services. Your digital asset management solutions provider should know how you work with those digital assets because they have been doing just that since the Truman administration! (Well, okay the assets were analog back then, not digital. But you get the idea.)

So it's not just DAM software as a service that Widen knows. Or brand management. We know that very well. But we also know content creation, production, photography illumination, manipulation, alteration, rasterization, conversion, color reproduction, composition, pagination, resolution and optimization. We understand how important your digital assets are to you because we live with them everyday.

Okay, I have to take off my sales and marketing hat and put on my Alligator wrestling boots and big kevlar gloves. it's time to feed the little digital assets. They grow up so fast, don't they?

Mark

Out of Gamut 2

Friday, February 13, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Out of Gamut Cartoons by Mark Pajari: Then I guess in 1993, something inside of him just snapped.

Magenta says you should host a reality TV show

Thursday, February 5, 2009 by Mark Pajari

What do your favorite colors say about your chosen career?

Are you an art director, but you always wondered if you should have been an undertaker like your parents wanted you to be?

Then here is something that is fun to try....

Our HR manager here at Widen sent me this simple test the other day because she knows I'm a color geek. It is really a career assessment tool, but it involves color, so I think it is blog-worthy here. The Color Career Counselor (no, I didn't make that up) from careerpath.com is powered by the Dewey Color System (no, I didn't make that up either) - the world's only validated, non-language color-based career testing instrument.

During the test, you are shown a set of primary color swatches (red, yellow or blue) and you are asked to pick your favorite and least favorite colors. It then has you choose your preferred secondary (green, purple or orange) and achromatic (black, white or brown) colors. After filling out a short form, it delivers your results and tells you the type of work you should be doing based on your color preferences.

Should you be a marketing manager, or a professional bingo player?
Take the Color Career Counselor test and find out.

If you want to read more about the test, go to the article that describes the test in more detail - Could Your Favorite Color Determine Your Perfect Job?.

Or if you want to jump right in and take the short test, go to the Color Career Counselor test on careerpath.com.

In my next blog post, I will take you to a test to see if you are using the right kind of furniture polish based on your Pop Tart flavor preference (Okay, I did make that one up).

Mark

A Toast to Color Management

Friday, January 30, 2009 by Mark Pajari

The Color of Toast

A lot has been written about color management as it has evolved over the years. Some of it is good and some of it is not so good. Some color management information is conveyed via thick books with a lot of mathematical equations in them. But for those out there that are not color scientists, there is one article that I think best describes what color management is, and how it's used in a very simple to understand way.

A number of years ago, Steve Upton, president of Chromix and the brains behind ColorThink - the indispensable color management software tool for evaluating ICC profiles and color workflows, wrote an excellent article called "The Color of Toast". This article has been around for quite a while, but is still very relevant. It uses a simple, brilliant analogy that makes color management concepts easy to digest, with or without strawberry jam.

Bon appétit

Mark

The Color of Toast...

Let's say you get up in the morning, walk out to your kitchen and place a piece of bread in your toaster setting it to a level of "4". After a little while a certain color of toast pops out - hopefully a pleasing color. Now if you take the next piece of bread in the loaf over to your neighbors and put it in his toaster at the same setting of "4" do you think you will get the same color of toast?

Probably not.

This is the problem of color management. The settings used on the toaster do not necessarily produce the same colors. As in the toaster, RGB and CMYK values on your computer are also just settings. And, just like the toasters, when they are sent to different devices, they produce different colors!

Now if you were a severe toast geek, you would toast 10 pieces of bread in your toaster; one at every setting. Then you would lay them all out in order on your kitchen table, grab the bag of bread and head over to your neighbor's. Avoiding his bewildered stares you would toast 10 pieces of bread in his toaster and take them back to lay on your table beside your toaster's work. Fanning through your Pantone independent toast guide, you would decide that "B" was, in fact, the color of toast you prefer. Looking up and down your toaster column you would confirm that yes, indeed, "4" is the setting on your toaster that will get you the color you want - you know this after several mornings of frantically waving smoke away from the alarm on your kitchen ceiling. After looking over your neighbor's toaster column, you note that a setting of "6" is what is needed to get the color you want from his toaster.

This, in essence, is what color management is all about. Carefully sampling what a device (monitor, printer, toaster, whatever) will do and then comparing it to an independent guide for actual color. In the case of the toast we used the fictitious Toast Guide and in the case of computers we typically use the Lab color space. Lab is a whole 3D range of numbers across 3 coordinates (L for lightness and a & b for color information). The important thing about Lab is that it is actually COLOR. That is, a number that represents a sensation.

To get the same color from different toasters, we needed to sample all the colors of toast the lowly machine could produce and then compare them to an independent guide. This lookup table is the equivalent of an ICC profile.

To get the same color from different devices - what we are basically trying to do here - we need to sample all the colors that device can produce and setup a table that converts between the device settings - say, a monitor - and the colors it produces at those settings. For a monitor we attach a device to the monitor and then run software that walks through a list of settings,: red (255,0,0), yellow (255,255,0), green (0,255,0), and so forth. At each RGB value, it takes a reading with the instrument and gets a Lab color back. After running through a long list that only a computer should have to suffer, a profile is built for that monitor.

If we want to get the same color from our printer as well then we also need to build a profile for it. The same technique applies. We send a file out to the printer that contains a long list of settings - for example: cyan (100,0,0,0), blue (100,100,0,0), magenta (0,100,0,0), and so forth. We then read each patch on the paper with a device like the Eye-One that supplies Lab values for each corresponding set of CMYK settings that were sent. A few calculations and your computer produces a profile for your printer. Great, you think, but how do I use these things? That depends on what you are trying to achieve.

A good example is when you want to get the file you print to match the one you see on screen. The file on screen is, by definition, in MonitorRGB and you need to convert it to PrinterCMYK. If you apply the monitor profile to the file, it will convert all those MonitorRGB settings which are unique to your monitor to Lab (remember the toaster).

Lab, you will recall, is color - so we are out of the arbitrary world of settings that only work for your monitor and on to something much more useful.

Any profile can be applied to those Lab values to get the color you want. In this case, we want the color to go to your printer. When the printer profile is applied it formulates the correct CMYK settings for each color in your file. A good quality profile will do a great job of matching those colors within the abilities of the printer.

Effective Color Communication Continued...

Thursday, January 29, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Talk the Talk

"The sky is too muddy."
"The fleshtone looks flat."
"The gold is too warm."
"The pants are too hot."
"The sweater is too cold."
"It needs more snap!"
"It needs more 'Buy me!'"
"Get this out of my sight!"
"Oww! My retinas! It burns! It burns!"
"This looks too sliver trombone slippy fish wondering socks."

If you have been in the business of color reproduction for any length of time, you are probably familiar with some or all of these comments. Well, okay, maybe you never heard the last few in that list. And the last one I made up completely. I mean, it doesn't even make sense, does it? If it does make sense to you then put the mouse down and step away from your desk. You've been staring at the computer too long.

Anyway, the problem is that all those terms are too ambiguous. They are all ripe for misinterpretation. Using vague terms like these when communicating color can often lead to extra proofing cycles, delaying the entire prepress production process, and may even effect press schedules.

Last week I posted a blog from a session at the PIA Color Management Conference called Communicating Color Effectively. At this session Don Hutcheson discussed the "Babel Effect" as he termed it. The fact that different people in the color production chain have different ways of describing the same color. The same holds true when trying to communicate desired changes to a given color.

More times than I care to admit, I have been reviewing color proofs with an art director that may describe a color as too warm. I might think, "Okay, it's too yellow." But the art director is really thinking it is too red. In my mind, warm=yellow, red=hot, cool=green, cold=blue. We may be thinking the same way, but communicate it differently, leading to different interpretations. Like the time my wife asked me "Can you clean the bathrooms?", and I thought she said "Can you watch six hours of football?" It's all in how you interpret it.

Knowing how to use proper terminology when marking up or communicating color is critical to the success of color image reproduction. See the link at the bottom of this post for a complete list of common mark up terms used in color reproduction.

So I say get the vague temperatures (cool, cold, hot, warm) out of the color approval process and speak in terms of color only. For a job going to press, it is okay to speak in terms of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. It is also perfectly acceptable to say "more red, less green or more blue". But be careful. Many people say blue, and may actually be talking about cyan. We don't print with blue or red. Blue is made up primarily with the component colors of cyan and magenta. Red is not the same as magenta - magenta needs a fair amount of yellow in order to morph into a color we know as "red".

Better yet, is to describe color alterations as Don spoke about in his session. Think in terms of the LCH color model (Lightness, Chroma and Hue). If a color is too dark, simply say "lighten". If a color is too saturated (chroma) say "desaturate". If an area of an image needs to be a little bluer, say, "Make slightly bluer".

For more information on the many common color mark up terms and their meaning, download the PDF file called Color Mark Up Terminology - A Compendium of Common Color Mark Up Terms Used in Color Correction and Retouching.

You won't find the silver trombone slippy fish comment anywhere in it. I Promise.

Mark

Out of Gamut V.1

Friday, January 23, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Read. Laugh. Rinse. Repeat.

When you use the term "Out of Gamut" in color management circles, it means you are probably talking about a color that is out of the range of colors a device can reproduce - Like a brilliant orange you cannot get on a four color printing press.

When you use the term "Out of Gamut" in cartoon circles, it means you are talking about a type of humor that is out of the range of typical humor that a cartoon like "Mary Worth" or "The Family Circle" can produce.

Actually, I just made that up. I don't know if that's true. But it probably is. I mean how old is Jeffy on "The Family Circle"? He has to be like at least 40 now, and he still looks like he's only 7years old. He has that strange, oblong head. He always leaves that thick, black dashed line as he takes the long way home, and sees that "Not Me" ghost all over the place. That's not particularly funny. It's just kind of creeps me out as I read the funnies on Sunday morning.

Actually, "Out of Gamut" now has another meaning in cartoon circles. It is the title of the new, hysterical, single-panel, full-color cartoon feature now being published on a major, growing, Midwest-based, graphic communications company's most excellent website. The first one ever produced is right below the block of type that your eyeballs are bouncing across right now.

Bookmark this page, and come back to my blog often for regular installments of "Out of Gamut". It promises to make you cackle at some common color management issues, chuckle at some typical computer conundrums, or positively pop a seam over perplexing printing, prepress or publishing paradoxes. Or at least make you experience a grin more than say, "Mary Worth" or "Prince Valiant" can.

Enjoy.

Mark.

PIA Color Management Conference: Take 3

Tuesday, January 20, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Let there be LED

Did you put LED lights on your Christmas tree last year? Do you have a flashlight with an LED light source? Do you have a new Apple MacBook Pro with an LED display? Do you have an LED reading lamp? Or how about LED slippers? Okay, I'm not sure they make the LED slippers, but if they did, I'm sure they are in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. If you are in the graphic arts biz, then one LED device that may be in your future is an LED light box.

LEDs (light emitting diodes) have been around for years in things like clocks, remote controls, jumbo television screens, coffee makers, tail lights or traffic signals. But lately they are popping up in even more places, including desktop light boxes. German company Just Normlicht (www.justnormlicht.com) announced at Drupa last year their new LED proofControl viewing station. They showed off their new viewing station at the PIA Color Management Conference in Phoenix last month.

LED proofControl is a viewing booth that can accurately simulate any type of light source including UV, D50, D65 and cool white fluorescent. Really any ambient light source can be measured with a spectrophotometer (like an iOne), and then simulated in the LED proofControl unit. The LED lights are much more efficient and stable than standard tubes, providing over 25,000 (10 times longer than fluorescent tubes) hours of usage without replacing the light source. Software allows the user to calibrate the device to match the whitepoint of the monitor.

The Just Normlicht LED proofControl desktop viewer uses the latest LED technology to accuratly simulate almost any lighting environment, and can be calibrated to match the white point of the computer monitor.

The LED proofControl units should be available the first quarter of this year. It is not fair to say that fluorescent tubes for color matching are on the way out at any point in the near future. These LED units are expensive - Over twice the cost of a similar sized viewer (around $4000). And larger viewing booths are not at all practical right now. The large area that would need to be illuminated would make them cost prohibited to produce at this time, according to Michael Gall, Just's Managing Director. But new advances in power LEDs and OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) may make this a reality in the not too distant future.

Mark

PIA Color Management Conference: Take 2

Monday, January 19, 2009 by Mark Pajari

Communicating Color Effectively

At the 2008 PIA Color Management Conference, Don Hutcheson presented a session called, "How to Communicate Color Effectively" Originally from New Zealand, Don is a private consultant (www.hutchcolor.com) with over 30 years of experience, specializing in the development and installation of color management systems. Although his work focuses on high end prepress, premedia and printing users, his clients also include agencies, art galleries, billboard makers, image banks, movie studios, newspapers, photolabs, publishers, and color management developers.

If you've never had the opportunity to hear Don speak, he is truly a pleasure to listen to. I think he really embodies the term "edutainment." You can't help but be entertained as you listen and learn from him. Maybe it's just his New Zealand accent that cracks me up. Or maybe I'm just easily entertained. Anyway, if you ever have the opportunity to hear him speak, do it.

Don began by covering the reasons that we communicate color - To describe a desired effect, to ask for a color correction or edit, to critique a color proof or print job, or to control how a file looks when printed. All of these involve the need to be able to effectively communicate color.

Color is personal, it is technology-dependent, it is affected by the environment, clients often don't understand production limitations, and clients, artists and technicians use different terms. These are all color communication problems.

Common causes for color errors:
• Non-profiled devices
• No embedded profile
• Ignoring the embedded profile
• Using the wrong profile
• Non-standard proofs
• Non-standard lighting
• Using non-standard color terminology

Key requirements when communicating color include:
• Education (client and industry)
• Proper use of ICC Profiles
• Use of standard color terms (spoken and written)
• Controlled viewing conditions
• Consistent, standardized proofing and printing
• Education, education, education, education....

Education is critical
To underscore how important client and self education is, Don stressed that education is a never-ending task. "It is the normal cost of doing business. They are cheap investments, and they pay for themselves," Don said.

Don then showed a number of screens to illustrate the fact that different devices see or display color differently. He showed how nine different cameras will capture color in nine different ways. He showed how four monitors can display the same RGB values differently, and how the same CMYK values can lead to five different images on five different output devices (press and paper differences). "Color cannot be expressed unambiguously in CMYK or RGB units," Don said.

Monitor proofing
In speaking about viewing color on screen Don stressed that monitor profiling and proofing is the cheapest, MOST VALUABLE use of color management. It saves cost and time of conventional proofing. It is the stable basis for color management.

Proof standardization
"The ONLY purpose of a proof is to predict how the press will print. And solving proof variations solves a major color communication problem," Don said.

He went on to discuss GRACoL/SWOP proofing and the need to have standardized proofing. "Insisting on GRACoL or SWOP certified proofs solves 95% of all color communication problems," Don said. He added that one of the outstanding proofing issues is that not everyone is using certified proofs yet.

Don went on to add that it is not enough to produce certified proofs. They must be measured. Control strips must be placed on every proof.

Note: Widen provides only industry certified SWOP and GRACoL proofing, and verifies each proof with color control strips on each proof.

Color Language Options
Don discussed the different terminology we all use when describing color, calling it the Babel Effect. He showed a single patch of red...

• The client calls it: Red hot
• The designer calls it: Pantone 185
• The printer calls it: 100M, 76Y
• The Photographer calls it: 230R, 0G, 50B
• The Scientist calls it: 49L*, 76a*, 43b*

Don then promoted LCH as the best color language when communicating color. Pantone is not a color space, RGB and CMYK are not single color spaces, and CIELab is not human-friendly. Don referred to LCH as "The human color space." L = Luminance (lightness), C = Chroma, H = Hue. Don used an analogy of the crayon to illustrate what LCH is. "We all remember crayons, right? Hue is what color the crayon is (red, blue, etc...), Chroma is how hard you press down with the crayon, and Luminance changes based on how much light is on the paper," Don said.

CIELCH as shown here in Don Hutcheson's diagram, is easier to understand, and communicates color more effectively than CMYK, RGB or Pantone.

When building a library of colors, Don stressed not to use the CMYK percentages indicated in the Pantone books. They are not matched to any standard proofs or printing. The Pantone number should be given. "Or better still, supply the actual Pantone chip. That way, a spectrophotometer can be placed on the chip to determine the proper color," Don said.

Don stressed that you should always accept embedded profiles when receiving files, saying that it's your best hope to see what the sender saw along with accurately profiled monitors at both ends of the communication chain.

Getting the word out
Don wrapped up by saying that you can only teach the people you reach, so he thought about how to reach a wider audience with his color communication message. He got some laughs as he showed his audience the billboards he created (in digital form only I suppose)...

There, I did my part to help get the word out, Don...

Mark

PIA Color Management Conference: Take 1

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 by Mark Pajari

10 Years of Technicolor Training

The annual PIA (Apparently "PIA/GATF" was too many letters to remember, so they dropped four of them) Color Management Conference wrapped up last month in Phoenix, Arizona.

The conference celebrated it's 10th anniversary this year. Ah, memories... I was there when the first conference kicked off back on December 5, 1999. It was held at the Tampa Airport Marriott hotel where about 120 printers, prepress/premedia professionals, photographers, consultants, brand mangers, and vendors got together to discuss color management issues. The conference has seen steady growth over the last ten years as more people were confronted with color management issues.

Although most attendees were from the US or Canada, people from countries as far away as Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Hong Kong, France, Germany, and the UK were among the more than 400 in attendance during the four day event. The conference was again held at the beautiful Pointe Hilton at Tapatio Cliffs resort on the north side of Phoenix.

A group of attendees from the very first Color Managent Conference in 1999 gather around a cake commemorating the anniversary. Among those joining me for the photo are: Dave Hunter - Pilot Marketing, Michael Makin - President and CEO - PIA, Eric Neumann - PIA, Don Hutcheson - Hutch Color LLC (sporting a beard!), Larry Warter - Fujifilm Graphic Systems, John Sweeney - IQ Color, Inc., Dan Caldwell - ICS, Inc., Steve Upton - CHROMiX, Inc., Gwen Martin - PIA, Arjen Van Der Meullen - Kodak GCG, and William Li - Kodak GCG

The conference this year featured two very solid keynote sessions. Duncan Berry from Applied Iconography addressed color perception as it related to global corporate brand management. He discussed how consumers perceive color and relate to different brands in a cluttered marketplace using the emotional power of color in packaging, advertising, design and innovation. Noted photographer Steven Johnson headlined another keynote session, where he discussed his extensive, pioneering work in digital imaging and photography. He discussed color management's application to digital photography. His work has been exhibited, published and collected in Europe, the US, and Japan.

I will be covering these keynote presentations in more detail as well as several other noteworthy sessions in upcoming blogs. So check back to The Color Space in the coming weeks for regular notes from the 2008 PIA Color Management Conference.

Mark

Call Me Mr. Biv

Friday, October 24, 2008 by Mark Pajari

What do x-rays, Ray Romano, and the Tampa Bay Rays have in common?

In a post a while back, I made the point that color really doesn't exist except in our minds. In order to have color in our minds, we have to have light. Put simply, color is light.

A Rainbow is a common display of the visible portion of the
electromagnetic spectrum

Visible light is a small part of a much larger body of energy referred to as the electromagnetic spectrum. This spectrum is comprised of wavelengths of energy with the longest being over one kilometer long, while the shortest wavelength is measured in billionths of a meter (or millionths of a millimeter!). At the long end of the spectrum are radio waves and radar. At the other end of the spectrum where the waves are very short we find cosmic rays, gamma rays, x-rays, Tampa Bay Rays and Ray Romano. Okay, forget those last two. But if it wasn't for a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, we wouldn't be able to see that Florida baseball team, or watch Everybody Loves Raymond. In a very narrow sliver somewhere in the middle of all those rays is a band of wavelengths that excites the retina at the back of our eyes, otherwise known as visible light. And we associate the different wavelengths in this range with different colors.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

Meet Roy...
In a small band between roughly 380 nanometers and 700 nanometers (nanometer = billionth of a meter) there stands a house where Roy lives. You will remember Roy from high school art class. Or maybe he was in your physics class. You know, he was always such a colorful character.... Remember he had that strange last name... Roy G. Biv? He had such a range of emotions... One day his face was red with embarrassment, another day he was green with envy, and other times he would seem kind of sad and blue.

Of course Roy G. Biv is how many of us learned the color wheel. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet are the colors you saw as you went around the color wheel. They are also the colors you can see in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Just outside the visible spectrum next to violet sits ultraviolet (from Latin which means "beyond violet") energy. Remember the cool posters you had in your bedroom when you were growing up? No, not the posters of Farrah Fawcett or Donny Osmond. I'm talking about the velvet poster of the unicorn jumping over the florescent rainbow. Or maybe it was an Elvis poster (Presley or Costello). The kind that glowed under your black light. The black light bulb produces high energy ultraviolet light. These bulbs are called black lights because you can't see that part of the spectrum. UV brighteners are often added to things like laundry detergents, whitening toothpaste, and paper. They are added to help make products look "whiter than white". The added UV brighteners in paper and even printing inks can make color management challenging at times.

Ultraviolet light is also used in security to help thwart counterfeiters. if you hold a black light up to your driver's license, or any credit card, you will see a glowing UV watermark that was otherwise invisible to you. You can also see a glowing strip running vertically through all US paper currency except a one dollar bill.

On the other end of the visible spectrum and also invisible to the unaided human eye is the infrared (from Latin "infra" for below) range. Some animals can see into both this range and ultraviolet, especially more nocturnal species. Infrared imaging is used in many areas including photography, weather forecasting (IR satellite imagery), astronomy and the military to name a few. Infrared is used in night vision devices to see in dark environments.

Did you know that you can see into the infrared range by using some things that may be around you right now? Try this at your next party. But be warned, this experiment carries a geek factor of 7.2, so expect some backlash in some social situations. Okay, get a remote control and a digital camera. Almost any remote control will work as long as it is not an RF, or radio frequency, remote. Most are not. The digital camera that is on your cell phone will probably work fine. Aim the remote control at the camera lens, and while looking at the LCD screen on the camera, press a button on the remote control. You should see the bright white-purple light at the end of the remote control that is usually invisible to you. The light-sensitive CCD or CMOS chip in the digital camera can see into this part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Cool huh? Okay, it's not that cool, but it illustrates the point.

Don't go into the light! The front of an IR remote control
as seen by a digital camera

So the next time you use your remote control to change the channel so you can watch an excellent show like NBC's "The Office", think about how you are putting all that infrared energy to very good use.

Mark

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