Final Thoughts November 5, 2006
Posted by kendallmpi305 in MPI305-2006.add a comment
When I decided to do Colour Management as my topic I honestly didn’t know that it would be such a big topic. There are so many areas that I haven’t covered, however I tried to post up the areas that I thought were of greater importance in understanding the principle of colour management (remembering that I didn’t know what colour management was) and the areas that I thought I could perhaps implement in my own workflow.
It became pretty apparent from the start that most of the thing that I was reading about on how to solve my printing problems (i.e., profiling printers, cameras, scanners etc) I would not be able to test due to cost and lack of equipment. After plowing through endless piles of research i did manage to come across things that i could implement.
These things were:
- How to calibrate and profile my monitor using Adobe Gamma
- Understanding and selecting the correct workflow for the job
- How to soft proof and use adobes gamut warning to identify problematic colours
- understanding which colour space to use for a specific pourpose
- Colour constancy and how to use this principle to get better results from my digital stills
At the beginning of this research topic i wanted to “determine the right recipe for the perfect print” and have i achieved this? Well the answer is no. What i really wanted was a what you see is what you get result, and that is impossible because there are allways going to be some colours that your monitor can display that cannont be reproduced by ink and vise versa. So i was really setting myself up for failure. At the end of the day all I could really do was to educate myself so that I can identify the problems that can occur and learn how to manage them better.
Colour constancy November 1, 2006
Posted by kendallmpi305 in MPI305-2006.add a comment
I found this little piece of information rather interesting so I thought I’d post it up.
Have you ever wondered why you get orange tinted photographs when they were taken inside under florescent lights? Why can’t the human eye see the orange tinge that the film can? the answer is that you don’t see the orange tinge because the human eye has colour constancy.
“Colour constancy, sometimes referred to as “discounting the illuminant”, is the tendency to perceive objects as having a constant colour, even if the lighting conditions change.” (Real world colour management p.46)
My understanding of this is that your eye changes its colour response depending on the light in the scene. Cameras don’t have colour constancy that’s why you get orange tinted photographs. However, today’s digital cameras allow you to change the white balance, which changes the cameras response to the illumination in the room. This is something that I have had a chance to do and yes by changing the white balance on your digital camera you get rid of the orange tinge and get a more true to life (or at least the human eye) representation of colour.
